music

It's not every weekend that Nitsa hosts an act that has this kind of thing to say about their work: “The song is about the invisible line we draw between our outer reality and our inner world. The darkside is a metaphor for the unmasked internal space that we rarely share with strangers. A secret realm that never sees the light of day. On the endless hunt for love, we crave a deeper connection that can only come with truth. The mirror sees you…on the darkside." Montreal synth-wave duo Desire have always been an interesting proposition, and these lines, uttered earlier this year about Darkside, the first single from their third album, Games People Play, are an apposite primer for the moods to be found on the new record and in their sound as a whole.

It took producer Johnny Jewel and vocalist Megan Louise more than a decade to follow up on Desire's much-loved 2009 debut II, which featured the typically cool, retro-futurist synth-pop track Under Your Spell, made famous by its inclusion on the OST for the movie Drive. It was worth the wait, however: Desire have picked up where they left off and with a second album in two years seem to be in the midst of a very welcome new creative purple patch. Minimal Wave label boss and excavator of countless forgotten cold-wave gems Veronica Vasicka also DJs downstairs in Astin, as does UK selector Kinetic.