Stevie G: Synth-pop era continues to shine

The relationship between music and technology has always been interesting, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately while playing tracks from the synth-pop era.

Synth-pop is essentially a genre where the synthesizer is the main music instrument and it emerged in the late 70s and early 80s and helped dominate pop music in the UK and this part of the world at the time. The music is still popular and influential today and I was reflecting on its power as I checked out a recent gig by Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip down at the Lee Rowing Club for Magic Nights by the Lee.

Hot Chip would be one of the most popular modern incarnations of the synth-pop sound, and for the last 25 years or so they have been evoking the classic sounds of original synth-pop, while also pushing it forward into a modern trajectory. I was very impressed with Taylor’s DJ set, which featured a lot of these influences, and which even included him singing his own music live over a backing track.

In this century, you could group Hot Chip, The XX, M83, Chromatics and many more groups in the synth-pop category, and its influence on pop music is very apparent too, with big name artists such as The Weeknd and Dua Lipa very much wearing this sound on their sleeves.

While we argue about the use of AI in music, it’s also interesting to me that many of the current man v machine arguments in music also took place at the turn of the 80s, when this synth-pop sound started to hit the mainstream. 

I guess it’s always been a part of the wider music debate, and the pushback v technology has always been there, since Bob Dylan went electric, but in the 80s these debates were all the rage. I was too young for these debates at the time and too busy enjoying teenage music magazines such as Smash Hits and Number One, which brought visual images of The Human League, Thompson Twins, Depeche Mode and Eurythmics to life, and often reprinted their lyrics too. Again, it was just music for me, but all of these groups were influential to me before I even realised it, and they were huge in that era.

As Alexis sang over his own beats in the Lee Rowing Club, I was again struck by how soulful this was, which was ironic, as one of the many criticisms from the anti-machine brigade was that it made music more mechanical and less human.

I’ve personally always felt that this was nonsense, and I still play lots of music from this era in my DJ sets. It sits perfectly with soul and disco and was obviously a huge influence on both house and many elements of modern hip-hop too, with Kanye’s seminal 808s and Heartbreaks being one of the biggest templates in the present day trap/soul and rap era. An album often derided at the time for its use of auto-tune is now rightly heralded as a classic, and rarely has Kanye sounded so vulnerable or soulful. From The Weeknd to Kraftwerk, it is possible to maintain the soul while using machines, and in a postmodern world, the stark minimalism of this synthesized music can be the perfect reflection of our times.

The timelessness of this music also struck me. Maybe I was just lucky to have been a youngster when these groups were on the radio, but the music of the Thompson Twins, OMD, Gary Numan, The Human League and many more still sounds amazing, and it’s ironic when you consider that some dismissed it as a novelty at the time.

In music, I’ve often felt less is more and, again, there’s beauty in the simplicity and execution of some of these songs. Things go in cycles and the music will go in and out of fashion, while the fashion of that era itself looks really striking now through the lens of 2025. It’s no wonder really that artists way too young to have seen this first time out are trying to evoke this era. Luckily many of the artists and groups are still active, and this summer Cork played host to Duran Duran, while the likes of Depeche Mode are still hugely popular worldwide, and tour every few years too. We’ve also had everyone from the Pet Shop Boys, Gary Numan and The Human League in Ireland recently, so the sounds of synth-pop will continue to reverberate for many decades to come!