Electronic dance music and the church might seem like unlikely bedfellows, when in fact they are not. Both share a sense of reaching the divine, of collective worship, of mantra and sacred rites. DJs, like the clergy, aren’t the focal point but the messengers, bringing the congregations The Word from on high. You’ll hear “take me higher” on Saturday night and Sunday morning. Diamond Cutter, the new album from Eve Maret, doesn’t interrogate faith in an overt way, but the trappings of faith offer a framework for understanding why it is electronic music of the highest order.
Maret, an electronic musician based out of Nashville, was raised as Christian, went to Mass three times a week, and has spoken of the “feeling of transcendence” she got from…
Category: synth-pop
Listeners could be forgiven for thinking Cold Beat was essentially Hannah Lew‘s solo project. The band’s lineup may have been a revolving door, but her softly compelling voice and fondness for icy electronics were always there. Nevertheless, Lew distinguishes herself as a solo artist on her self-titled debut album. The two albums Cold Beat released before going on hiatus, 2020’s Mother and the following year’s War Garden, were dense, ambitious statements; in comparison, Hannah Lew’s reflections on the opportunity for change that upheaval provides are strikingly direct. Lew describes it as a “wartime album,” and there’s a feeling of liberation from the start.
She begins the album with “one foot out the door/another in the other world” on…
“I hate this country, and I hate this island – but sometimes the people make it all worthwhile,” sings Simon Tyrie on ‘Space un the Cab’, the wonky disco banger that kicks off The Itch’s debut album It’s the Hope That Kills You. The track cuts decadent club euphoria with a general feeling of unease while calling out Britain’s slowly eroding nightlife scene. Across the ten infectious songs that follow, The Itch – Tyrie and Georgia Hardy – push back against everyday rage, disillusionment and frustration with party-starting electro-punk tracks that demand human connection.
The community celebration has been there since the start. After years of making music together, Hardy and Tyrie formed The Itch after taking part in the annual Byrne’s Night gig, which…
Jess Weiss takes the shadowy intensity of her band Fear of Men deeper into chasms of dark synth pop with Pain Will Polish Me, the debut album under her solo guise, New German Cinema. While Fear of Men have incorporated electronics into their sound at times, the songs of Pain Will Polish Me are built almost exclusively around heavy synth bass, uneasy ambient pads, and programmed drum sounds, creating a foundation of Weiss’ songs that’s sharp and menacing while still making space for hooks. A perfect example of this tenuous balance is “I Become Heavy,” a track made up of tortured verses and exciting dance-pop choruses. Weiss’ ability to take the song from the dungeon-ready atmospheres of early Cure material to club-ready melodies at the flick of a switch is…
Over a two-decade career, Robyn has made some of pop’s most propulsive, bulletproof bangers – not least ‘Dancing On My Own’, an eternal, iconic anthem about forging your own path out of heartbreak. On her ninth album Sexistential, though, we find her unmoored and questioning, the end of a long-term relationship having catalysed the explosion of everything she thought she knew about love, life, sexuality, motherhood and more besides. Robyn invites us to journey with her through the unravelling. With a deceptively purposeful strut that evokes the bionic pop of ‘Body Talk’, opening track ‘Really Real’ marches us into an ambivalent sex scene – “You’re mid-performance, I’m planning my escape… I want to swallow but it ain’t the same” – that…
Grace Ives has spent the past several years turning archetypal formats — the nursery rhyme, the ringtone, the 9 to 5 — into a repertoire of oblique pop standards so well-crafted they belie the personal chaos inside them.
She trades in stories of glamorous disarray, all bruised egos and Irish exits and rambling thoughts. By Ives’ own estimation, she spent the three years after the release of her 2022 breakthrough, Janky Star, crashing out: drinking too much, pushing people away, falling down, etc. Eventually, she ditched booze, made for Los Angeles, and learned to drive, soundtracking her rides with Peter Gabriel, Mitski, and her personal top-ranked song of all time, Kesha’s “Die Young.”
It tracks that Girlfriend, her resplendent and…
Vacate the ice baths, people, Ladytron have gone all warm and gooey. The trio are best known for sleek and bleak synth-pop. And they’re masters at it. But for their eighth album, Paradises, Helen Marnie, Mira Aroyo and Daniel Hunt are sounding, well, happy. Two years on from Time’s Arrow, the Liverpool-formed group have headed for the disco. One probably where everyone one is wearing black, but still, there’s dancing.
The group’s new found fun kicks off with ‘I Believe in You’, a banger that uses the hypnotic Roland sound of A Guy Called Gerald’s 80s acid house classic ‘Voodoo Ray’. The sound is used again on ‘A Death in London’, ‘Free, Free’ and to great effect on album closer ‘For a Life in London’, a spoken word song with Pet Shop Boys DNA.
All Are Welcome In: A Return to Maraqopa is a redux album by Damien Jurado, released on March 16, 2026. The record features reworked versions of songs originally from his “Maraqopa” trilogy — Maraqopa (2012), Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Sun (2014), and Visions of Us on the Land (2016) — a series of concept albums produced in collaboration with the late Richard Swift.
The project was co-produced and engineered by Lacey Brown at J&B Studios in Edmonds, WA. According to Jurado, the release fulfills a vision he and Swift had discussed years ago — revisiting and reshaping songs from the trilogy after its completion. Many of the tracks featured on this release were performed live during Jurado’s “All Are Welcome In” tour in the autumn of 2025.
London-based, Wrexham-raised artist Art School Girlfriend releases her third studio album Lean In, via Fiction Records. Armed with the freedom and space to experiment, Lean In was self-produced in her own East London studio and sees Art School Girlfriend set to move from cult bedroom artist to one of the UK’s most vital artist/producers operating at the moment, tackling alternative rock, electronic pop and experimental ambient sounds in her most cohesive work to date.
Starting off with a looped beat, followed by some ambient sounding synthesiser, Doing Laps is an interesting track to start the album. It feels almost dreamlike with Art School Girlfriend’s whispery sounding vocals, with a backdrop of ambient synths, almost new age…
Now 20 years since the start of the project, The Winter Sounds has an international sensibility and a distinct global vision. Formed by Patrick Keenan in Athens, GA, the group now includes a few European members and has Prague as its home base. The group hasn’t necessarily adopted a world music sound, but instead maintains its roots in indie pop and new wave. Despite this, the band has articulated a global outlook, drawing specifically on the ideas of the solarpunk literary movement, with a focus on grassroots movement toward a sustainable future. With The Winter Sounds’ seventh album, Jupiter, the band puts forth a positive and encouraging message supported by bright and optimistic sounds.
With single “Kaleidoscope,” the album opens…
Camouflage are one of the few German bands to have been making music successfully at home and abroad for the last couple of decades. “The Great Commandment” (1987) and “Love Is A Shield” (1989) were actually worldwide hits. After four albums, Camouflage felt it was time to experiment. This phase reached its zenith with the album Spice Crackers in 1995 – the most daring, most interesting work they ever released. Electropop tracks sit side by side with hypnotic, repetetive, spheric tracks. Now, 30 years later, “Spice Crackers” will finally be released on vinyl for the first time!
Heiko Maile, Camouflage founder member and producer of “Spice Crackers”, has this to say about working on the album: On our previous productions, we started out with just a few…
Joseph Oxley has long made music that feels like tuning in to a pirate radio station broadcasting from the 1990s. As TVAM, his go-to staples are saturated guitar, acid keys, dreamy shoegaze-frayed vocals, and beats like the stamp of a thousand Doc Martens.
Ruins, however, flicks the dial towards something far more personal, its once-bright palette now refracted to near-monochrome.
The emotional shift is immediately obvious. “Comfort Collar” opens with a heavy-footed pulse and a smear of synth like blue neon through rain-streaked glass. It’s oddly comforting in that slightly seamy way a goth disco can be. From there, the record moves through titles like “The Gloom,” “In Memory” and “The Haunted,”…
Pet Shop Boys release a Blu-ray/CD of their concert film Dreamworld: The Greatest Hits Live at the Royal Arena Copenhagen. The film captures the spectacular stage show of the Pet Shop Boys tour with dazzling visuals and a bumper set list packed with classic hits, including “West End Girls,” “Suburbia,” “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money),” “Left To My Own Devices,” “Rent,” “Domino Dancing,” “Love Comes Quickly,” “Always On My Mind,” and “It’s A Sin.”
The film was recorded at the Royal Arena in Copenhagen in July 2023 as part of Pet Shop Boys’ critically acclaimed Dreamworld: The Greatest Hits Live Tour. Directed by the renowned David Barnard, the film was captured using a 14-camera 4K shoot to ensure an immersive experience for viewers.
Phantasmagoria: A bizarre or fantastic combination; a constantly shifting, complex succession of things seen or imagined. These definitions wholly encapsulate the circumstances that shaped the narrative structure and exquisite tonal palette coursing through Ani Glass’s thrilling second LP. Its long-awaited arrival ends a five-year gap since the Welsh-Cornish artist released her critically acclaimed solo debut, Mirores, a momentous milestone in her career that was unfortunately usurped by a benign brain tumour diagnosis. Glass’s latest material, on which her production style demonstrates great growth, is a sumptuous synth-pop meditation on processing that traumatic period whilst untangling the experiences and emotions that steered her to…
Continuing Pet Shop Boys’ infrequent series of remix collections, Disco 5 mainly focuses on the duo’s own remixes and productions for other artists, like Disco 4 did, rather than outside remixes of their own material, like the first three volumes. Of course, when the pair remix or produce a song for another artist, they pretty much turn it into a Pet Shop Boys song, and considering that the majority of Disco 5 consists of material created during the 2020s, it’s close to being a PSB album that happens to have a lot of guest vocalists on it. Two of the set’s highlights are minor rarities that hadn’t appeared on a PSB collection until now. The duo produced several selections on the soundtrack to the 1993 film The Crying Game, including Boy George’s hit title track, but…
Backtracking a bit from previously issued volumes of the series, Musik Music Musique 1979: The Roots of Synth Pop functions as a sort of prequel, mapping out the blueprint of the new wave revolution of the ’80s, from synth-heavy post-punk and art rock to some of synth pop’s earliest chart-toppers. It’s not as if electronic instruments weren’t prominent in popular music before 1979, but synthesizers were clearly well on their way to being a defining characteristic of the musical landscape. The set starts with the Buggles’ “Technopop,” proposing a name for the music of the future — Kraftwerk would later give a song a similar title on 1986’s Electric Café, which originally had the working title Techno Pop as well, and decades later, a reissue retroactively bore…
…”Microwave,” the 1989 track from Japanese singer Kyoko Koizumi, opens with a plasticky creak and a kitchen timer ring. Adding in crunchy guitar samples, a thudding drum machine and a house-inspired keyboard solo, the chart-topping vocalist embraced the playful spirit that defined Japan’s experimental ’80s genre, known as techno kayō, or techno pop. Positioned on the B-side of the new vinyl-only compilation, Techno Kayō Vol. 1: Japanese Techno Pop 1981-1989, “Microwave” proves that this sometimes-underestimated genre still has the power to surprise.
Lovingly compiled by Toshihito “Dubby” Maeyama (owner of Onda records) and Antal Heitlager (co-founder of Amsterdam’s renowned Rush Hour label), Vol. 1 sets out to establish…
Lia Braswell’s Rising is forceful and expressive. Each song sounds an individual statement without there being any real sonic outliers (or weak points, for that matter) in the bunch. This makes for an intense listen, but a rich and engaging one too. The musical backbone is a relentless dance rock, mixing the thundering beats and assertive electronics of Pet Shop Boys or the Eurythmics with the breakneck, organic rush of Florence + The Machine and the complex, artful freedom of Wye Oak.
“Out of Sight” belongs to the 1980s, with a thudding, dead-eyed beat, glancing, urgent bleeps, and big burns of synthesizer that curl into a spacious instrumental bridge. “One Too Many” is another for the Less Than Zero crowd with some Duran Duran menace programmed…
Cherry Red, longtime home for Howard Jones’ catalogue, release an unheard set from the beginning of his career.
Live at the Marquee, finds the inimitable singer-songwriter-keyboardist wowing a crowd at the late London venue just before his commercial breakthrough in 1983.
The wholly unreleased show, was unearthed from master tapes when the label began compiling bonus material for reissues of his former Warner catalogue in 2018, and remixed by Jones himself for this release. (It appears from the metadata that three of these Marquee tracks were originally released as B-sides to early singles.) The packaging includes rare and unreleased photos of Jones from the period.
When the then-28-year-old Jones took the stage…
Marc Almond has personally curated this celebratory 2CD expanded re-issue of his lesser known 2016 electro-pop album. Lesser known simply because, hitherto, it has only had a limited vinyl release in Germany.
Silver City, now a definitive 20 track techno-pop opus, was written and produced by Marc with celebrated cult German electronic music production duo Starcluster and is Marc Almond’s “most synth laden body of work since Soft Cell” (Electricity Club, 2016). It is indeed, a sheer joy to hear Marc Almond’s deft and distinctive vocals alongside a vast array of vintage analogue synthesisers in this resplendently authentic, retro-futuristic setting; an album that provides an eloquent refracted echo of his formative synth-pop work in revered…