This 12-track companion album to the documentary about the band features 2023 remasters of such songs as “Whip It,” “Girl U Want,” and “Beautiful World” plus covers of “Working in the Coal Mine” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”
Acclaimed filmmaker Chris Smith (Wham!, Fyre, 100 Foot Wave, and Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond) captures the gloriously radical spirit that is DEVO – a rare band founded by a philosophy; a Dada experiment of high art meets low, hellbent on infiltrating American popular culture. Through never-before-seen archival and interviews with Mark Mothersbaugh, Bob Mothersbaugh, and Jerry Casale, DEVO relishes in the highs, lows, surreal moments and incredible performances of a 50-year career, embracing the spectacle…
Category: synth-pop
Electronic music pioneers Soft Cell release a super deluxe reissue of their classic 1983 album The Art Of Falling Apart via Universal Music. Soft Cell’s – aka singer and frontman Marc Almond and multi-instrumentalist and producer Dave Ball – second album is freshly remastered by Barry Grint from the original tapes and shows off the feted duo’s gothic take on pop music in all its full, darkly textured glory. Following directly on from 1982’s seminal one-of-the-first remix albums ‘Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing’, ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’ reached No. 5 on the UK charts. As befits an album celebrating difference and choosing art over the glitzy 80s pop dream, ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’ gloriously twists and turns between anger, frustration and destruction to beauty, reflection and unity.
…features 28 unreleased tracks and takes the listener on a journey from the band’s earliest demos and BBC Radio One Sessions through the singles to the album and beyond. Each disc contains rare and, in most cases, unreleased versions of songs.
Universal Music Recordings are shooting a new box set in the right direction, covering Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s U.K. pop landmark Welcome to the Pleasuredome in exhaustive new detail.
Though it’s already been exhaustively been reissued – once on a 2CD set from Salvo Music, on 2014’s vinyl/cassette/DVD set Inside the Pleasuredome (along with a 2018 Record Store Day box set of 12″ singles and the 2022 RSD comp Altered Reels, which brought a pair of…
Jane Inc. began as both a product of lockdowns and a statement of liberation. The pandemic-spawned project has allowed its CEO — Toronto-based artist Carlyn Bezic — to present a more stylistically promiscuous, lyrically provocative identity separate from her collaborative pursuits in the U.S. Girls universe, reinventing this seasoned indie axe-slinger as an all-seeing art-pop auteur equally enamored with electro-disco and bossa nova, like a DIY Madonna who never left the Danceteria. But the euphoric feeling of self-discovery captured on Jane Inc.’s first two albums — 2021’s Number One and 2022’s Faster Than I Can Take — was offset by anxieties over the horrors outside her window and life in their aftermath. “I can’t square the calm/And the eerie…
Home Counties’ flirtation with provincial-pivoting alt anthems alongside lyrics mapping tongue-in-cheek suburban excursions – by way of socially-charged takes on contemporary life – found feet on last year’s funk-flecked debut LP Exactly As It Seems. Tracking from rural to urban since their formation five years ago, the East London-via-Buckinghamshire six-piece intersect space and time in equal sonic measure. Their first two EPs came leaning on the skewiff yet nimble post-punk footwork of acts such as Yard Act and Squid to evermore synth scored dabbling that has seen the band flaunt twitchy electronic segues adjacent to straight-up indie-pop panache.
Finding voice through dual vocalists Will Harrison and Lois Kelly, Humdrum pins its focus…
Amateur is prolific musician Molly Nilsson‘s 12th album, and while it stays true to the specific style of D.I.Y. synth pop she’s always created, it also embraces eclectic influences the way her previous album did. The title also refers to the joy and enthusiasm that drives creation, even though the word amateur also gets taken to mean someone who lacks professional qualities or ethics. To that end, her music seems to follow in the tradition of independently released synth pop efforts from the early ’80s rather than big-budget chart-toppers, with songs that might sound rough and unpolished, but are undoubtedly sincere and passion-driven. The lyrics also offer commentary on life in a capitalist system, delivered from the perspective of someone who’s worked hard…
It’s seven years since the Belgian brothers Dewaele unleashed their fine, largely instrumental and foot-stomping Essential album on the world, but they’ve given short shrift to any ideas of sitting on their laurels in the intervening time. Their new album, All Systems Are Lying still points emphatically towards the dancefloor, but it brings plenty of new flavours to their sound and is considerably more song-based than its predecessor.
This isn’t to say that Soulwax have gone down the standard guitar, bass and drums route on their new album. Their sound remains emphatically guitar-free in fact and still sits very much in electronica territory despite their three drummers. There are, however, shades of LCD Soundsystem and Depeche Mode evident especially on…
…Remastered from the original analog files, the special anniversary release sees a wealth of brand new material including seven unreleased tracks from the album’s multitrack sessions, mixed by Paul Humphreys. The release also comes with two demos, an alternative mix, four never-before-heard songs, plus non-album b-sides and extended or 12” mixes.
First released on June 17, 1985, the band’s sixth album took OMD across the pond and became their breakthrough record in the United States. Spearheaded by the single “So in Love,” which entered the Billboard Top 40, and radio smash “Secret,” the album received acclaim in the U.S. and also saw success in the UK and Europe. It peaked at No.13 on the UK Official Album Chart.
One of the strangest phenomena of early ’80s pop is that U.K. pop duo Naked Eyes – who stormed the Top 10 in America in the summer of 1983 with a thunderous synth version of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Always Something There to Remind Me” – completely missed the chart at home. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that a forthcoming expanded edition of their debut, featuring three unreleased demos and a fistful of non-album tracks, takes its cues from the American version of the album.
…the newly deluxe edition of Naked Eyes, mastered by Phil Kinrade at AIR Mastering, offers the album as it was released by EMI America in 1983, not long after a slightly…
…features a brand-new song titled “Decoy” as well as demos of “Cosmic Joke” and “Truth.”
“Enter the room of nothing / Enter the room of me,” sings Haley Fohr on ‘Skeleton Key’, backed by the buzz of organ and electric guitar. She towers above, her voice theatrical and macabre, a quality that’s always been there in her contralto delivery, but never as bombastic.
That room could be the basement studio in Chicago where Halo On the Inside first took shape. For eight months, she locked herself away there, embarking on long, late-night writing sessions. Like the record’s cover, she existed in a vacuum, exploring new sounds, synths and parts of herself. Time and place get wobbly when you’re up all night on your own in a windowless room. Fohr found…
The mask and Stetson have become shorthand for Milo Korbenski’s cultivated mystique, like a minor character in a Nicolas Winding Refn film. But despite the title, Sex Angel, his second outing for Phantom Limb, suggests the costume isn’t a kink. It’s protection. Korbenski has always been prolific, but here he wrings songs out of his own anxieties, externalising private crises through scuffed textures, skewed beats and lyrics that teeter between confession and provocation. He calls it an “optimistic album”, but this optimism has been dragged backwards through a club and kicked out back: protesting, bruised, but still singing.
The album’s three singles tell most of the story. “Six Angle” is all brute persistence, two chords hammered out while a fuzz-choked…
The first thing you hear on Later Than You Think isn’t despair — it’s motion.
John Maus doesn’t linger on endings; he arrives with a strange urgency, like someone shaking you awake at 3 a.m. to say, start again. Every synth line, guttural phrase, and abrupt lurch forward carries that insistence. Based in the Ozarks of southwest Missouri, Maus has been quietly refining his craft, and with Later Than You Think, he asserts himself with a clarity and authority that feels both inevitable and surprising.
The opening track, “Because We Built It,” sets the tone immediately. Maus carries the weight of what has been made and what has crumbled, transforming it into something palpable and kinetic. His baritone anchors the chaos,…
With the band garnering more and more acclaim with each album as Ian Devaney and associates expanded their somber synth pop sound to include more experimental ’70s touchpoints alongside vintage inspirations ranging from goth to the New Romantics, Nation of Language’s third album, Strange Disciple, became their most highly lauded yet, even topping Rough Trade’s list of best vinyl albums of 2023. The group re-enlisted Strange Disciple producer Nick Millhiser (Holy Ghost!) to record their Sub Pop label debut, Dance Called Memory. Still experimenting with recording techniques as well as their style spectrum – Strange Disciple, for instance, found them incorporating more live instrumentation than before – Dance Called Memory includes what Devaney…
It’s not often you’ll hear of an artist making the best work of their career by their eighth album. However, with Baxter Dury, this couldn’t be truer.
Allbarone’s dancier feel excels due to producer Paul Epworth’s (Adele, Florence + the Machine) touches in the studio. A fortuitous meeting at Glastonbury last year brought the pair together, and their partnership here results in Dury pushing himself to go against the sonic familiarity of his more typically minimal approaches.
His Fred again.. collaboration (‘Baxter (these are my friends)’) back in 2021 offered the first signal of where Dury’s sound could travel with some dance-ready tunes thrown into the mix. Now, he has fully embraced them and penned a nine-track tour de force laden with biting…
Hot Chip’s brand of dazed and fizzy alternative dance & synthpop has been their signature plate that’s decorated with various coats across different records, gaining them the widespread attention that has persisted ever since. Now 25 years in as a band, they’ve assembled their essential tracks within Joy in Repetition, celebrating the songs that stood out in their storied discography.
Like it or not, Hot Chip has formed an affinity for groovy repetition in their sound. Started back in 2000, each subsequent record always provides an addition to their kinetic alternative dance rollicks. Refining mid-tempo bliss and shuffling synthpop bops across The Warning to in Our Heads, dabbling further in house tones on Why Make Sense, injecting ethereal atmospherics…
By the time they released 2025’s Moments, listeners knew what to expect from Cut Copy.
The band deliver plus-sized dance rock meant to fill large venues, leavened with uplifting melodies, shiny synths, and Dan Whitford’s earnest vocals. There might be some techno influences, some ambient atmospheres, a house beat or two, and even some U2-style cinematic outreach, but in the end they sound exactly like Cut Copy and no one else. That’s a comforting thing for fans who are happy with the direction the band has taken, and once again they are undoubtedly in full control of their sound and know how to tweak it a little to keep things fresh. Here they add trap beats on the title track, 808 squiggles on “More Alive,” and a children’s choir on…
The Finnish duo of Sandra Tervonen and Juuso Malin, better known for misty textures, clears that fog by embracing California’s surrealism to let in some light.
A vulnerable breeze is immediately felt upon the first acoustic chords of “Delusional On Sunset Blvd”, which are bolstered by shimmering synths that prove to be an uncharacteristic backdrop for Tervonen’s distinctly elven voice. The Voices Are Coming Back is a newly bright-hued venture for Pearly Drops; instrumentally, there’s little haze to be heard. Instead of recording in their familiar home of Finland, they physically branched out to the glamour of California, a move both alienating and magical.
No longer are Pearly Drops’ haunting,..
…contains the brand-new track ‘Perfect Lies’ plus exclusive new remixes and acoustic versions.
While undeniably a step forward in Alison Goldfrapp’s tentative solo debut, Flux remains distant from the heights scaled alongside Will Gregory as Goldfrapp. Despite impeccable craftsmanship provided by the likes of Richard X, Flux frequently feels mired in its own lushness, burdened by a strange inertia. The mid-tempo monotony accentuates this lethargy, diluting shimmering beauty into something laboured rather than effortless. Goldfrapp’s vocals too often sit groggily atop the mix like lactoderm, hampering the livelier textures beneath.
‘Reverberotic’, here, is the thumping and brilliant exception that proves the rule, all nonsenical…
