End.Game: a synth album from 19A0

End.Game is a dark, dreamy synthpop album, all swooping pads, punchy beats and mysterious retro auras. It's the work of Luscious-235, a joint-venture between Sid Luscious (of 80s fame fronting The Pants) and "the artificial entity known as Unit 235".

This album immediately seizes a special place in my heart because it was inspired by my short story Mixtape of Lost Decade and its mythology of the 19A0s: a forgotten era between the 1970s and 1980s so culturally traumatic that it erased itself from our collective memory. Artifacts from the 19A0s, the story goes, now leak out through the internet and other liminal spaces—and here we are.

You can't expect an unbiased review from me, then, but obviously you should go and buy this album right away.

It is, after all, an act of archaeology.

End.Game. by Luscious-235Nonetheless, I loved Luscious-235's particular grasp on its aesthetic, especially the straightforward production and intense lyricism. End.Game ignores the self-consciously soulless nostalgia that immediately marks a lot of modern synth as contemporary to the 2010s, instead going to the source: cool tech, mopey vocals and sense of cultural asynchrony. It comes from the 80s side of the 19A0 divide. It's the sort of music I was trying to reacreate with trackers on a Commodore Amiga as a kid--an impossible emulation of something already uncannily out of time.

And here I am listening to Ocean City and Midnight Drivn, wondering if that's the same lamborghini tearing down the night highways around not-Miami I imagined back then. Read the rest