Listen: Espoir by Nao

Opening with looping drums and cut up vocal sounds, Espoir, from French artist Nao, primarily deals in vibes.

Cool blue synth tones and springy synthetic bass create a sunny warmth before a female vocal instructionally deadpans a series of moves. The result is a buoyant piece of music — it’s getting lost down Mediterranean backstreets, holding hands with someone you care about, jumping into the pool, eye contact. Collage-like, Nao has made something evocative yet also abstract. In terms of genre, this it exists somewhere between French touch and Underworld, briefly veering into a starry eyed break of scattered beats before returning to a heartland of thick electronics.

Espoir is taken from Nao’s debut EP, Feels Right. Nao created the song in a flurry that took less than two hours, and it “explores freedom, escapism, and moving forward without looking back”. Having previously played bass and production duties for the French outfit Later, Nao has spent six years at the heart of the Parisian music scene and is now applying all he has learnt into a focused solo project.

Check out Espoir below.

In addition to listening in the post, you can find almost all the music BlackPlastic covers on the music player of your choice. Add the dedicated playlist below:

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Sound Club featured album: II by Desire

This is a cross-post from my Sound Club music club, where I regularly share an album for listening and discussion. Check out the club here.

Amidst all the bigger shifts in 00s alternative and electronic music — nu rave, the resurgence of post punk, electroclash, Ed Banger and the impact of French touch — there was something much subtler happening a little further behind the scenes.

Based out of Portland and West Hollywood, a record label called Italians Do It Better was quietly cultivating a kind of cinematic deadpan electro. With a style that referenced Italo Disco, listening to the early releases from the label gives a little glimpse into what became the future. The sound has a dose of Electroclash (more on that another time), but with the edges sanded off. In their place are glossy surfaces, albeit with nothing to reflect but black and chrome.

The resulting sounds ended up manifesting in many movies, Drive, for one, but the label also both channeled, and influenced, David Lynch. Indeed, Italians Do It Better co-founder Johnny Jewel ended up contributing fairly heavily to the soundtrack to Twin Peaks: The Return.

One of the artists in this set who most stood out to me were Desire. Formed by Jewel himself, together with vocalist Megan Louise and, at one stage, Nat Walker (also a band member with Jewel is Chromatics — again, more another time). To this day, they have only released three albums, with an extended 13-year gap between their debut (confusingly sometimes called II, sometimes simply Desire), in 2009, and 2022’s Escape. Nonetheless, they are an act whose influence is quiet but enduring.

II is arguably anchored around two pretty staggering stand-out moments. The first is the fractured break-up song, Don’t Call, which sees Megan Louise instruct a former lover to “Don’t call, to talk about nothing”. Overdubbed vocals, washed in reverb, shimmer and fracture atop a slow synth string backing and a simple drum pattern. The result is a lesson in economy — haunting, beautiful, heartbreaking and catchy as hell.

The album’s other peak moment is the obsessive Under Your Spell, which sees Louise opine about a person whom she can’t escape the thought of. This is Desire at their absolute best — she calls into the darkness that “I don’t eat, I don’t sleep, I do nothing but think of you…” It reflects those moments where feelings for another person can become so all consuming that it is all you experience. In the bridge on the full-length version (throw out anything below 4:30 long, seriously), Megan Louise drops into a spoken word delivery, asking us the difference between love and obsession, before seemingly referencing André 3000 in a chant of “forever ever?”. It’s a playful yet ultimately devastating moment. We’ve probably all been there.

The beauty here is how perfectly Desire capture the feeling of floating adrift in our emotions — it is uncomfortable and all consuming, and tempting to want it to go on forever … And yet, at the same time, we know that is impossible. Dreams will end, and it will be time to wake up. Again, it all feels very Lynchian — otherworldly and heavenly, yet sinister.

Elsewhere, the album has plenty more beautiful moments of similar restraint. Colorless Sky sees a series of simple chimes playfully float among a stark synthesiser melody, almost child-like in its simplicity, even as the result is a chronically adult feeling on monochromatic depression. In all honesty, the one criticism I would have of II is that moments like this are almost too much — okay to dip your toe into, but too sad to live within.

Listen: Vitamin K by Vega VI

Based in Berlin, German-Danish musician Vega VI creates a kind of glitch-dream-pop sound that channels the dramatic dance energy of Robyn but combines it with the more artful experimentation of Lyle Li, Björk, and Portishead.

The result, as heard here on Vitamin K, is twitchy kind of electronic pop. It throbs with crunchy percussion and layered synth tones, an alienated and robotic piece created for our AI age. Brittle, hollow melodies arc and sway like robotic arms, and Vega VI’s vocal picks out humanistic lyrics through a filter of technological making.

In the accompanying PR, the title of the song is taken from the vitamin that helps our bodies heal, closing wounds to stop the bleeding. Here it works as a metaphor for the kind of wound that we experience as a result of modern society. The pain the song tackles is related to a sense of modern isolation, with Vega VI describing that song as:

“ …made for anyone who feels lonely in a city of millions. It's about endlessly reaching for connection in a hyperdigital world, only to slide off the surface.”

Vitamin K is taken from Vega VI’s forthcoming album, Everything. Listen to Vitamin K below, and look out for the album next year, due 7 May 2027.

In addition to listening in the post, you can find almost all the music BlackPlastic covers on the music player of your choice. Add the dedicated playlist below:

Apple Music

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Listen: On the Radio by Deco

With their sophomore album, Dreamhouse, released today, Nottingham synth-pop outfit Deco have been working to establish a colourful collage of energetic synth pop.

Accompanying the album is On the Radio, a pulsing piece of cinematic electronic wonder. Evoking the kind of nostalgia I felt listening to Chromeo’s tongue-in-cheek Old 45’s, Deco play things a little straighter here with On The Radio, whilst channeling the feeling of your song playing on the radio. The idea is deliberately held loosely — regardless of whether this is literally a song you created, as perhaps it is for Deco, or is simply a song so personal that it feels like yours. Describing that feeling, frontman Max Kendall says:

“There's something pretty surreal about hearing ‘your song’ on the radio … On The Radio is about that rush – big dreams, spontaneous nights with your favourite people and that feeling that something good might be about to happen.”

Hopeful vocals punctuate a verse that bubbles with taut drums and a chugging electronic bass. As Kendall’s vocals launch into the chorus, however, we are blasted with a feeling of colour and warmth. The excitement captured in that moment is infectious — a little hit of sunshine that makes you want to skip down the pavement or dance your way down the hall.

Check out On the Radio below, and look out for the album Dreamhouse, out now. You can also check out the band headlining the following shows:

7 November – Nottingham, Rock City 20 November – Manchester, Academy 3

In addition to listening in the post, you can find almost all the music BlackPlastic covers on the music player of your choice. Add the dedicated playlist below:

Apple Music

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Listen: Movie Stars by Wallners

I saw the Strokes perform at the O2 in London recently. During their set they performed the track The Adults Are Talking, which throbs with a kind of stringy krautrock-influenced thrill. Sharp percussion and fuzzy bass propel the song as a pair of guitars create a kind of aloof yearning unique to the Strokes. Julian Casablancas retains his cool even as his vocal nears a kind glasslike fragility more familiar to Thom Yorke.

I’ve listened to that song about 40 times since that concert, and every time it ends I still want to hear it again. Hitting play on the new single from Wallners, Movie Stars, I found myself pouring into my brain what feels like the same song but craft out of some sort of galactic space rock from an alternative galaxy. Familiarly angular drums combine with evocative guitar melodies, and yet where the Strokes channel their distinctive New York aesthetic, Wallners have something that is more shoegaze in nature, yet just as thrilling.

Crystalline guitars hover as vocals shift and mutate, instrument-like in their aesthetic. The taut percussion, functional and grounded, only highlights the sense of altitude that opens up elsewhere here. Reverb kicks in like a rush of blood to the head, guitars screeching and howling, and yet never anything but angelic and beautiful. Movie Stars sounds like seeing everyone you love slipping away for the last time as you look back at the earth shrink to a dot. It is both beautiful and terrifying.

Accompanied by a music video directed by award-winning filmmaker Rupert Höller. Shot entirely on 16mm film, it accentuates the feeling of the song through the use of handmade sets, without the use of any AI.

Wallner are comprised of four siblings from Vienna, and Movie Stars follows on from the group’s debut album, End of Circles, and a 29-date headline tour. Marking the start of their work on a second album, Movie Stars was influenced by a set of old microphones from the 1960s discovered in their basement. The group describe the resulting sound as being somewhere between Mazzy Star and Daft Punk, which is a fantastic description if ever I heard one. Beyond the Strokes, I have spent much of my summer listening to Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl so in Love, and there feels like a commonality in inspiration here, even where the end products differ. But maybe I’m just floating in a Petri dish of similar emotions…

In addition to listening in the post, you can find almost all the music BlackPlastic covers on the music player of your choice. Add the dedicated playlist below:

Apple Music

Spotify