Hit That Perfect Beat: The London Records Story is a double-CD companion to a podcast of the same name, charting the history of the label from the early 1980s, after the British branch of Decca Records was acquired by PolyGram. Though the label was reopened in the 2010s, the compilation stops in the early 2000s, bringing highlights from more than 20 years of hit releases.
The set starts out in the new wave era, with a few classics like Bananarama’s enduring “Cruel Summer” and Bronski Beat’s queer anthem “Smalltown Boy,” along with U.K. hits by acts drawing from folk (the Bluebells, Hothouse Flowers) and soul (Total Contrast, Carmel). Bronski Beat appear again with the compilation’s namesake tune, and leader Jimmy Somerville’s…
Category: synth-pop
Having a solo project has been Josh Conway’s dream since he was a child. Between then and now, he has found international acclaim with The Marías, of which he is the drummer, primary producer and co-writer of nearly all of their material. With this outfit, Conway broadcast his distinctive production style, blurring bedroom-pop and dream-pop hallmarks with psychedelic undertones. There is an ethereal, understated and cohesive quality to The Marías, whilst still retaining a penchant for pop capacity and heterogeneous production. As many listeners of Conway will likely have come from The Marías’ fanbase, there will be trepidation about how similar it may sound, how far he will drift from the band sonically, or whether his production style works without his band.
For music fans of a certain vintage, the name Hue and Cry will immediately send them back to the late 1980s. Pat Kane and his brother Gregory seemed to be the epitome of the sharp-suited, smooth pop-jazz-soul that was so popular back in those days. Yet there was more to them than a snazzy image – their biggest hit ‘Looking for Linda’ sounded like a swooning ballad but was actually about domestic abuse, while their signature track, ‘Labour of Love’, was an infectious, politically-charged critique of capitalism.
Although the brothers haven’t particularly troubled the charts since 1991’s Stars Crash Down album, they’ve very much remained a going concern, releasing a number of albums since they reformed after an appearance on ITV’s…
Filtering one of Borges’ short stories through the theory that our world is just a computer simulation, JJ Weihl uses ambient synthscapes to frame head-spinning ideas about knowledge and chaos.
“You who read me-are you certain you understand my language?” asks the narrator of Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel.” The Argentine writer’s short story, first published in 1941, imagines an infinite archive of books in which the alphabet has been configured into every possible combination, resulting in a limitless array of texts meaning everything and nothing. In creating Library Copy Do Not Remove, her third solo album as Discovery Zone, JJ Weihl connected Borges’s logical puzzle to the simulation hypothesis, the popular theory that, since at some point…
Back in 2024, La Grande Accumulation, the acclaimed first collaboration between Turkish sound artist and photographer Anadol (Gözen Atila) and French composer, musician and singer Marie Klock was compared with everything from folk to French chansons and even Krautrock, but what everyone agreed on was its eccentricity. On Manivelles that eccentricity persists, but the album feels less of a complete statement and more like a bunch of oddities and fragments, a collection of pebbles gathered on the seashore for their strange and evocative shapes. That difference might be ascribed to the very different ways the two albums came together. La Grande Accumulation was the fruition of a thrilling first encounter, an unexpected meeting of minds and talents.
“You can change the chapter, you can change the book, but the story remains the same if you’d take a look”. So runs the chorus line from ‘Nobody’s Diary’ by Yazoo, an unexpectedly prophetic lyric looking forward to the formation of Doublespeak. For here is a supergroup founded in the 2020s but rooted almost entirely in the early development of electronic music.
As supergroups go, this one is entirely logical – and in fact, the only surprise about the Orwellian Doublespeak is that it took this long for them to form. Electronic music royalty Vince Clarke (not just Yazoo, but Depeche Mode and Erasure) and Neil Arthur (Blancmange) have been good friends since the early 1980s, when making your own pop music was fast becoming a pleasure…
Released at a pivotal moment in their career, Tensongs remains one of the most fascinating chapters in the catalog of Hubert Kah. Arriving in 1986, the album marked the band’s full transition into English-language material, an ambitious attempt to carry the success of the Neue Deutsche Welle movement into the broader international synthpop market. Forty years later, Tensongs stands not only as a time capsule of mid-80s electronic pop, but also as an underrated artistic reinvention.
Produced by Michael Cretu and Armand Volker, the album wrapped Hubert Kah’s melancholic songwriting in sleek, atmospheric production that clearly aimed beyond Germany’s borders. The influence of sophisticated…
Future Islands are an emotionally charged synth pop group, known for their dexterous melodic touch, stately momentum and impassioned delivery. Over the past twenty years they have travelled a rare arc, from promising newcomers to best-kept secret, from cult favourites to heroes of the genre. As they reach this remarkable milestone, they resist the obvious move.
Instead of a ‘best-of’ compilation victory lap, Future Islands present From a Hole in the Floor to a Fountain of Youth – an immediate and accessible collection – half of which has never appeared on streaming services – comprising alternate hits, rarities, and fan favourites that showcase the band’s palette and bring further colour to their uniquely universal appeal.
Somewhere along the lines of their history, MUNA started calling themselves “the best band in the world.” Not the best synthpop band, or the past queer band, but the best, period. It’s a tall order for three people who make excellent pop music, a genre that, for most people, doesn’t hold a lot of weight or seriousness. But MUNA makes pop music, and even though they’ve done it for almost a decade now, it was surprising to hear the synths and pulsing beat that kicks off Dancing On The Wall, the title track for their ecstatic, buoyant fourth album, as if they’d grow up and get real. But of course MUNA would still make pop music. What else would they do?
Atop one of their stickiest melodies, MUNA-Katie Gavin, Naomi McPherson…
Keith Forsey is often remembered for writing Don’t You (Forget About Me) for Simple Minds, and – ironically – for little else. That hit song from a memorable 1985 movie (The Breakfast Club) is by no means something you’d want others to forget, and yet there are many other blockbuster moments of note in a blistering career.
Survey the producer, songwriter and drummer’s many credits – running into several thousand contributions over half a century – and you will discover a Zelig-like figure who was present and often instrumental in the creation of assorted epoch-defining music. If his name is rarely mentioned, then you suspect he likes it that way.
You’ll not find interviews with him should you go searching on the internet.
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…
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…