I caught Riot in Magenta by chance as I was snaking past Baybeats Music Festival a few months ago. So far the duo, formed by singer-songwriter Eugenia Yip and keyboardist-producer Hayashida Ken, have released just a two-track demo on CD, but it’s already clear that their dreamy lungful of synth pop soundscapes will conquer quite a few sleepless hearts in time to come.

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I think this tune is going to be on a lot of peoples’ Song Of The Year lists. It’s taken from their new album, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, which I’m sure will be a synth-pop laden corker.

Curxes (pronounced ‘curses’) are one of the most exciting new bands you’ll hear all year. Roberta Fidora and Macaulay Hopwood make music that will suck you in, invade your brain, and make you lose sense of time. Their music is somewhere between Depeche Mode and Crystal Castles.

Les Rita Mitsouko was a creative and eccentric French duo in the eighties, combining elements of punk, rock, synth pop and jazz. Coupled with the band’s colorful, wild, over-the-top image, Rita Mitsouko were groundbreaking, not only in their music style but also in their visual video art. American record producer and musician Tony Visconti produced the No Comprendo album for Catherine Ringer and Fred Chichin. The most successful single from this album was C’est comme ça. The video is a timeless peace of art celebrating the French avant-garde music video style of the time.

Baltimore synth-pop band Future Islands have been busy lately. Along with In The Fall, a 12″ EP of b-sides released earlier this month, their Thrill Jockey debut In Evening Air is due out May 4, right at the start of a month-and-a-half-long tour. Gerrit Welmers lays down dance-y New Wave rhythms and William Cashion slams hard on the bass, while Sam Herring’s frenzied bellowing vocals sound like a drunken Greg Dulli doing covers at an 80s karaoke bar.

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We’re not shy about our love of all things 80s, and Goldfrapp’s Rocket clip has taken us right back to a cloudy pastel world of big hair, synth optimism and glittering disco. We might just stay here for a while. Who’s in?

This cool tune from Bats For Lashes‘ new album, Two Suns, is a cross between Kate Bush, Depeche Mode and every synth pop song that never made it BIG.

Don’t be afraid of the word retro. It has haunted us all from time to time, but one group that has embraced it with open arms is UK duo, La Roux. Their music is synth pop in the vein of Calvin Harris, Human League, The Eurythmics, and The Knife. There are quite a few of these young and ambitious pop starlets on the scene including Goldielocks. But La Roux takes the cake. Literally. I’m obsessed with their song In For the Kill and have a feeling summer will take it and make it a hit.

Australian band Van She had a cultish hit single a little while back with their synth-pop track Kelly. The voyeuristic film clip was simple enough — girls called Kelly kissing boys — but it was strangely beguiling. We asked the guys where the creative inspiration for the clip came from: ‘We worked on that video with a friend of ours who has a really strong style in terms of Grading and set plotting and location spotting, a style which was perfect for the song Kelly. At the time we were, and still are, really in to movies like the Breakfast Club, Virgin Suicides, and anything that has that lost sense of nostalgia’. ‘I think Kelly is such a poppy song and is really optimistic, so we thought Nicholas Randall would be perfect for that sense of confused, elated and warm nostalgia. And, yes, we auditioned about 200 girls called Kelly and found the cutest, most normal yet quirky bunch for the video and asked them to bring someone they want to kiss in the video. Mikey and I were at a club once after we shot it and this guy came running up to us and with a huge smile on his face and hugged us both and said, “Thank you so much! You don’t understand. I have wanted to kiss my friend all of my life and finally got to because of your video”. That for me was the best reaction to the song Kelly we could have ever hoped for’.

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