Time + Reason: A Synth Pop Playlist

Today I’m sharing a playlist—one of the first I made on Spotify, in fact. I put this set together in 2014, which was apparently nine years ago, but I’m not sure I believe that.

It’s called Time + Reason: A Synth Pop Playlist. I wasn’t especially into synth or electro pop in 2014. I just happened upon these various loosies and, evidently, saw them as belonging together. A lot I came across through working on The Deli, a free local music magazine distributed around New York at a time when you couldn’t throw a stone in Brooklyn and not hit a band (I previously wrote about The Stepkids, one of my favorite assignments from working on that mag). But there are also songs here that I first heard in Spy nightclub in Dublin, tunes from films, a remix of La Roux’s “In For The Kill” that isn’t the dubstep version, the track from the GTA V advert. You could say in our new algorithmic civilization, this was an organic effort.

Stylistically, the playlist veers from 1980s retro revivalism, new wave, laptop electronica, disco, white hipster PBR&B, Carpenter-esque scores for movies that don’t exist, and beyond. Many of these acts appear to have fallen defunct and are long forgotten—remarkably, no track I selected appears to have been pulled off Spotify. So I’m glad this playlist has survived. And I hope you enjoy it. On the link below.

Time + Reason: A Synth Pop Playlist

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