Listen: Always With You by Honddu

Encompassing duo Holly Müller and David Neale, Honddu met at a feminist literature lecture. Utilising synths, vocals and tape textures, the pair have been making electronic music with analogue elements ever since. The pair draw on the experimental sounds of the likes of PJ Harvey and Kate Bush, through to Massive Attack and Portishead.

Here on their latest single, Always With You, Honddu have recorded an entire song on a vintage Tascam cassette-based four-track recorder. I remember a friend using something similar to this to record music in his bedroom when I was a teenager… I don’t know if it was a Tascam specifically, but it was a wonderfully tactile way to create music. Until now, I have never considered how they could be used to lay down electronic music. Honddu do that, and the result lends a grounded, nostalgic feel to their sound.

Always With You sees Müller’s vocals deal with buried emotions — the kind of yearning about lost love that creates a feeling too large to hold all at once… Too big to even know in single moment. Against a delicate backing of soft keys and sweeping synth murmurs, she sings of a vision of a love returning. The song simmers, sitting with those suppressed feelings, perhaps brought to the fore through a dream, a flash of memory, a passing scent, or the sight of someone who looks like a past love.

As the song reaches its second half, Always With You ratchets up the electronics, a looping synth pad wrapping around the vocals. In this moment, Honddu evoke the experience of becoming lost in your emotions, giving yourself over to just sit with how it feels to love, to lose, and to live with that experience. The result is a minimal yet uniquely emotional experience. Check out Always With You 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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Listen: The Check by YPYPY feat. Pauna

My 11-year-old son is at a point where he is beginning to develop his own taste in music and (surprise!) it currently skews more electric. Daft Punk are his favourites, but we have also been exploring somewhat adjacent artists, including lots of French Touch, but also The Chemical Brothers.

The new single from YPYPY feels like a Chemical Brothers joint straight out of their Dig Your Own Hole and Surrender era. With a big beat influenced intro, YPYPY layers drum loops and a snappy vocal to create an intense wind up. It’s when the bass drops that The Check really clicks for me however — an assertive, distorted howl of a sound that follows a staccato rhythm, synched with chunky percussion.

The result is modern piece of electronic music that wears its influences on its sleeve, and I love it. I just wish it wasn’t so short — so much electronic music these days is crafted for algorithms, denying the music the chance to really build. Regardless, here’s to a talent weaving electro, big beat, breaks and more into a deliciously unpretentious snack.

Listen to The Check 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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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:

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