Category: synth-pop


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…

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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…

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The 12″ single redefined music and the way we move to it, something that’s celebrated on the fantastic new four-CD collection from Cherry Red Records, Extended Stimulation: 12″ Pop Adventures on the Dancefloor 1983-1988. While 12″ vinyl is generally associated with disco, electronic, and hip-hop, this box set explores just how revolutionary it could be for traditional pop music, featuring tracks from the likes of New Order, Simply Red, the Human League, Duran Duran, Talk Talk, Pet Shop Boys, and many others.
However, these may not be the songs as most people remember them. That’s because everything here is either a remix (or extended mix) of some kind, originally released on 12″ vinyl. A little history lesson may be in order. Before the 12″…

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Released in 1989, Def, Dumb & Blonde is Debbie Harry’s third, solo, studio album.
Although Debbie Harry‘s popularity had decreased by the late ’80s, 1989 wasn’t a bad year for her at all. That year, Blondie’s former lead vocalist successfully portrayed a struggling singer on the brilliant but underrated CBS crime drama Wiseguy, and demonstrated that she could still have considerable fun in the studio.
Under the direction of hit producer Mike Chapman – who had worked with Blondie, as well as with everyone from Sweet to Scandal – Harry delivers an eclectic CD that isn’t in a class with a Blondie treasure like Parallel Lines but nonetheless has a lot going for it. Much of this new wave-ish pop/rock and European-flavored dance music…

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Across the world, cassette tapes have often carried far more than music, serving as tools of  defiance, memory, and belonging. In Somalia and Somaliland, songs recorded on battered tapes crossed seas and borders, keeping scattered communities connected through poetry and melody. In Palestine, revolutionary anthems slipped through checkpoints and broadcast the sound of resistance where radio could not reach. In Afghanistan, banned voices lived on in bootleg cassettes passed hand to hand, their melodies vehemently resisting the silence imposed upon them.
In Iran, too, the cassette has been used as both a weapon and a refuge: First used by Khomeini to spread his revolutionary sermons, it was reclaimed by Iranian pop artists fighting to…

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…remastered & with 5 bonus tracks.
“Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day”, maintains Paul McGann’s character near the start of Withnail and I. He plays Marwood – the ‘I’ of the title – in a drunken and druggy but decidedly unpsychedelic cinematic glimpse into the late 1960s. The film initially flopped in cinemas at the height of 1980s yuppiedom, only to find cult adoration (and over quotation) via subsequent release on video. Everything has its right time in the end. And so it is with Henry Badowski’s one and only album Life Is a Grand, which is finally getting the reissue it justly deserves after all but disappearing, along with its creator, to near complete indifference following its release in 1981. Indeed Badowski himself seems more…

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…From benders in Seven Sisters and the smell of petrol stations off the North Circular, to mourning drifting friendships and ‘what could have been’, Real Lies’ critically acclaimed 2015 debut saw the electronic duo oscillate between the existential and the quintessential at whim.
Similarly, 2022’s Lad Ash saw a delicate balance between nostalgia-laden reflections (queues outside the fish shop and post-rave disorientation) with musings on self-expression. With We Will Annihilate Our Enemies, Kharas and Pat King continue to carry the torch for modern angst, and learning to love it in the process – pulling from an even broader palette of influences to create their most mature, refined work yet.
Pat King pushes their anthemic sound further.

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…remastered by Geoff Pesche at Abbey Road.
After breaking through to massive U.K. fame with his 1979 album The Pleasure Principle, and its chart-topping new wave isolationist anthem “Cars,” Gary Numan got darker, more intense, and more solemn on his second proper solo album, 1980’s Telekon. The shifts in his work were happening quickly, with both Replicas (the last of two albums Numan made with his punkier group Tubeway Army) and The Pleasure Principle being released in 1979, and the songs for Telekon being written and recorded by the end of that year, but held back for a release in September of 1980 as not to flood the market. Telekon was, in part, Numan’s response to overnight success, with songs that alluded cryptically to conclusions and…

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…features exclusive remixes from artists such as Midnight Magic, Prins Thomas, and Lindstrøm.
Nora Schjelderup is one of Norway’s leading DJs, and is also the creative force behind Ora the Molecule, who have just released Dance Therapy, which might be the most accessible avant-garde disco pop concept album you’ll hear this year.
Ora the Molecule has existed since around 2015, releasing a series of singles that were compiled on Human Safari in 2021. Human Safari is filled with modern Euro-synthwave, with just enough throwback sounds to conjure up the feel of a lost Thompson Twins album for fans of 1980s technopop.
While Human Safari is technically Ora the Molecule’s debut record, Schjelderup has…

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…deluxe 3CD set include 19 extra tracks – focusing on lesser-known B-sides, late ’80s and early ’90s albums, and even material that Tom Bailey and Alannah Currie released in the ’90s under the name Babble – along with the premiere CD release of ‘Into the Gap Live’, the audio of a longform video release from 1984 that was recently issued on vinyl for Record Store Day.
The 1980s were heady times for synthesizers and drum machines. Ushering out the distorted three-chord guitars and traditional drum/bass/guitar lineups of the punk and stadium era rock of the decade that preceded it.
New Wave bands like OMD, Human League, and The Pet Shop Boys created a dance-friendly genre that was light on sneers and anger but…

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Ultravox’s 1984 best-of compilation The Collection sold over 2 million copies worldwide after its release and went triple platinum in the UK. It includes the band’s first 14 singles released between 1980 and 1984. The best-known tracks include the cult song “Vienna”, the anti-nuclear war anthem “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes”, the new wave classic “All Stood Still” as well as “Hymn”, “The Voice” and “Reap The Wild Wind”.
Now “The Collection” is being re-released remastered in various formats with different bonus material. This newly remastered compilation has been expanded into a 4CD/2Blu-ray Deluxe Edition. The set includes a second volume of “The Collection” with a further 14 singles from 1986 to 2024, alternative and unreleased versions.

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Fully remastered and features previously unreleased B-sides, rarities and remixes by Todd Terry, The Beatmasters, Sly & Robbie and more.
žYou may not know his name, but you’ll probably recognize his voice. Since the death of Klaus Nomi, Somerville has reigned as the best white falsetto singer in pop music; his soaring voice propelled Bronski Beat and the Communards to respectable chart positions (especially in Europe) during the 1980s, and his return to musical activity finds him in excellent form. Dare to Love doesn’t really break much new ground for Somerville. He’s still working the club floor with disco-inflected dance-pop, and his melodic sense is still as strong as ever — from the airborne melodic lines of “Heartbeat” to the down-and-dirty funk of…

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Memento Mori: Mexico City is the counterpart to Fernando Frias’s Depeche Mode: M, an artistic endeavour of a film that explores the music of Depeche Mode and the profound appreciation of death that permeates Mexican culture. Interspersed with poetry, Mexican legends and stirring sequences that ruminate on mortality and impermanence, Depeche Mode: M documented Dave Gahan and Martin Gore’s series of concerts at Mexico’s enormous Foro Sol Stadium in 2023.
This release packages up the Depeche Mode: M film with a complete Foro Sol concert, containing 23 masterful live versions of Depeche classics like ‘Enjoy the Silence’, ‘Everything Counts’, ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ and ‘I Feel You’, as well as tracks taken from their most recent album,…

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…includes the original album, a collection of B-sides, new and classic remixes, and previously unreleased live radio sessions.
It’s something of a mystery why Mute Records waited until early 2006 to release Goldfrapp’s third album, Supernature, in the U.S. After all, when it came out in the U.K. the previous summer, it made the duo into a bona fide chart success, to the point where the album’s terrific lead single, “Ooh La La” — on which Allison Goldfrapp channels Marc Bolan’s dippy-cool vocals and lyrics over a shuffling, glam-tastic beat — drew comparisons to former S Club 7 star Rachel Stevens’ similarly glam-inspired hit “Some Girls.” While Goldfrapp might balk at being called (or compared to) a pop act, it’s undeniable that the duo has…

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It has been announced that YMO 1979 Trans Atlantic Tour Live Anthology, the first live box set to compile audio and video recordings from the five concerts held in four cities during Yellow Magic Orchestra’s 1979 world tour, will released on April 2025.
In 1978, Yellow Magic Orchestra made their debut on Alfa Records (as it was then known) with the album Yellow Magic Orchestra. The following August, they performed their first overseas concert at The Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, where the show was recorded live and filmed. Later that fall, they embarked on the Trans Atlantic Tour, becoming the first Japanese band to undertake such a world tour. Transporting more than 1.5 tons of equipment, they performed seven shows across three countries- the UK, France, and the East Coast of the United States-true to the tour’s name, “Trans Atlantic.” Live recordings were made at their performances at The Venue in London (two shows), Theatre Le Palace in Paris, and The Bottom Line in New York.

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Calling Chin Up Buttercup a breakup album may be factually accurate but it’s woefully inadequate when describing the music aimed at reconstructing life after turbulent relationship heartache and loss.
The experiences used to flesh out each song cover the full cycle of grief, denial, acceptance etc., all while wrapped up in the need to bottle up any misery. The album title being a sardonic note on the social compulsion to plaster on a smile when everything inside is crumbling.
As Austra, the incandescent alter ego of Katie Stelmanis returns having dealt with those electric currents of grief and laid them to rest following the abrupt ending of her long-term relationship in early 2020. The emotional weight of that sudden erasure is seen everywhere.

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A new box set highlight Propaganda’s significant legacy within the history of synth-pop. The Düsseldorf group’s work for the Zang Tuum Tumb label will be the focus of the new 6CD set A Secret Sense of Rhythm, A Secret Sense of Sin (The Complete ZTT Propaganda).
Propaganda was the first band to sign to ZTT, the label co-founded by Trevor Horn, whose music as a member of the Buggles, Art Of Noise, and Yes plus extensive production work earned him stature as one of the key architects of 1980s music. In their earliest recordings, captured for ZTT between 1983 and 1985, Propaganda were crucial contributors to that moment, as chronicled on the new anthology.
Disc 1, Secret, focuses on Propaganda’s 1985 debut album A Secret Wish, which featured…

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After a recorded absence of over 20 years, Liverpudlian duo China Crisis release Autumn in the Neighbourhood, their first album since 1994’s ‘Warped By Success’ which was issued on their own Stardumb imprint.
Although Gary Daly and Eddie Lundon have maintained a continued live presence since that time, other than a cover of Michael Halliday’s ‘Starry Eyed’ for the ‘Liverpool Number Ones’ charity album in 2007 which also featured Omd, new material has been notable by its absence.
But ‘Autumn In The Neighbourhood’ sees the return of the melodically inventive pair who have seen elements of their sound re-emerge in acts such as Mirrors and Sin Cos Tan. From the synth friendly leanings of ‘Christian’, ‘Wishful Thinking’…

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