Browsing Tag

Electro Pop

Marvin Dark Twisted RnB Innovation and Pop Etherealism into the Rabbit Hole of ‘GET AT ME’

Posted on 2 May 2026
Marvin Dark

If the algorithm knows what’s good for the music industry, it will feed the hype of LA’s Marvin Dark’s latest release, GET AT ME, until it’s a viral sensation that soundtracks summer.

The artful approach to twisting the aesthetics of pop etherealism, contemporary RnB, world music and 8-bit-adjacent motifs until GET AT ME unspools as a wavy, semi-lucid single that swells through the soul as you fall down the rabbit hole with the spiralling melodies gives the single a weightlessness capable of defying the laws of gravity. Marvin Dark handles that dreamy suspension with serious finesse, letting the arrangement drift and coil around the vocal with a teasing sense of seduction that keeps the temperature high and the footing deliciously unstable.

The slick with off-kilter charisma release remains playful in spite of its evocative charge, which finds its voltage through the nuanced use of vibrato and vocal effects, lending the release an emotionally rounded aura, which paints desire as an emotion that vulnerably approaches hope. There are shades of The Weeknd in the late-night magnetism, a touch of Blood Orange in the airy sophistication, and hints of early Jai Paul in the warped pop alchemy, giving Marvin Dark a potent shot of crossover appeal in RnB and beyond.

GET AT ME is now available to stream on all major platforms, including SoundCloud. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Emotional liberation hit full tempo in Lucy Crisp’s Electro-Pop earworm, Snakes and Ladders

Posted on 27 March 2026
Lucy Crisp

Lucy Crisp has long since perfected the art of instilling alchemic rushes of euphoria into electro-pop earworms. In Snakes and Ladders, the UK breakthrough artist reached her creative zenith by letting vindication oscillate through the kinetically powerful production. The feverish tempo within the EDM-pop progressions fires up as an emotional accelerant, heightening the bite in the lyricism that calls out to anyone desperate for salvation from the sting of manipulation. She’s a firebrand in Snakes and Ladders, morphing anger into infectious licks of ecstasy while keeping the whole thing radio-ready and undeniably built for the dancefloor.

The single marks another bold stride in a career already defined by fearless intensity and reimagining moody pop through Crisp’s signature wildcard authenticity. Crisp creates tracks for those ready to step into their unapologetic selves. Her sound thrives on playing it unsafe, sewing together striking synth production with confessional songwriting that moves between vulnerability and defiance in a single note. Her 2023 debut EP, 65 Roses, released through Youth Music’s NextGen programme, opened up space for conversations around hidden disability and mental health, showing her natural instinct for turning private weight into shared catharsis.

Stepping into 2026, she’s building momentum with boundary-pushing pop shaped for big feelings and bigger stages. Snakes and Ladders feels like a turning point in her ability to scintillate through emotional clarity and deliver dancefloor adrenaline.

Vindication rarely arrives with this much colour, confidence or kinetic force. For pop fans who crave catharsis wrapped in euphoria, this one is an instant fix.

Snakes and Ladders is now available on all major streaming platforms, including SoundCloud. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

The Fuss Injected Neon Adrenaline into Their Sugar Rush of a Synth Pop Debut, Kerosene Candy

Posted on 15 February 2026

In The Fuss’s Kerosene Candy, the debut single surges as a synth-driven sugar rush, acting as a conduit for the cosmic to become hypersonic while you’re carried through the adrenalised euphoria of relit nostalgia. The melodies and harmonies sweep through with equal force, forming a soundworld that wears its trailblazing stripes within the production itself. There is no need for a pre-existing arsenal of accolades when the neon-lit glow of love’s hues sits so vividly inside the arrangement. After the dreamy, almost woozy feeling pulls you under, the solo sends the track into a warped-synth crescendo blazing like a polyphonic inferno, with guitars cutting straight into the retro timbre without tainting the aesthetic.

The Fuss managed to break the mould without steering the listener into uncharted territory that feels unsafe. Once the first chorus lands, there is a certainty that you’re in the hands of evocative innovators who can write about infatuation inside a pop earworm as though it is a novelty. The entire track leaves a lingering trail of fireflies behind the eyes once the silence returns, paired with the impatience that always arrives after a debut shaped with this level of ingenuity.

The Columbus-grown outfit has identity through alternative-pop inclinations, pulling from neon-soaked 80s synth textures and the emotive guitar energy heard in bands such as The Band CAMINO. Their rising live reputation stems from high-energy shows built for front-row catharsis, while their songwriting aims for the emotional sweet spot where nostalgia, desire, and urgency fuse in a way that reshapes what modern indie-pop can carry.

Kerosene Candy is now available on all major streaming platforms via this link.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Toiz wires euphoria straight into the system with her glitch-struck anthem Kamikaze

Posted on 29 September 2025

Toiz touched down on material reality just long enough to drop her most recent seminal 8-bit hyper-pop track, Kamikaze.

Her sound belongs to a transhumanist future we haven’t caught up to yet, but every pulse of Kamikaze, which picks up where Atari Teenage Riot left off and injects intravenous shots of e-girl etherealism into the kinetic mix, brings us closer. In that imagined future, our rhythmic pulses are still electrified with beats and strobing synths, shimmering euphoria through our synapses.

Written, produced, and recorded entirely by multi-platinum songwriter Brooke Toia, Kamikaze is a high-stakes electronic pop anthem where love becomes a weapon and a shield. The glitchy beats twitch with urgency, soaring synth lines blur the line between ecstasy and chaos, and her vocals deliver each line like a prayer you whisper while the world is burning. Toiz sonically enacts love as surrender, throwing herself into the melee where devotion becomes strength.

Kamikaze marks the third instalment in the growing Toiz project, following Kryptonite and Sails, which explored vulnerability and freedom. This chapter feels bolder, fiercer, and more unshakable, proving Toiz has constructed a world where futuristic visuals and unfiltered emotion sit shoulder to shoulder. With her global songwriting credits and a decade of shaping other artists’ successes, she’s now building something entirely her own — a project as cinematic as it is cathartic, one beat away from rewiring the way you think about electro pop.

Kamikaze is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Madishu’s debut LP, Owe It to Her, fires intravenous shots of Indietronic Art Pop serotonin & resillience 

Posted on 23 September 2025

We may have forgotten how to just sit with sound, letting it hit us somewhere deeper than the screen-scattered mind. But Madishu’s debut album, Owe It to Her, is exactly the kind of art pop tonic worth surrendering your attention to. Texturally sublime, emotionally fanged, and rhythmically impossible to ignore, it’s an indie electro triumph built for listeners who crave movement and meaning in the same breath.

Through vibrant crescendos and dream pop’s quiescent shimmer used as a spatial anchor, the LP lets resilience flow freely after catharsis. Syncopated beats give your limbs something to follow while Madishu shapeshifts vocally – from smoky and demure, to hyperpop firestarter, to classic pop siren. It’s a 10-track escapade of chameleonic relief.

Her ability to drift from moody indietronica to dubstep-decorated, dance-worthy kinetic beats to artfully ahead-of-the-curve installations of EDM pop proves her tracks are more than earworms; they’re hits of pure synthesised serotonin, delivered with the conviction of soul-prised lyricism. If any track defines her as the phenomenal force she is, it’s Happyish, with Afrobeat hip-hop heat & fervent time signatures that match the energy of vocals that envelop the mix in an aura that words fail to define. The euphonic timbre of the harmonies transcend from the track, washing over you with the fire that sparked the track that rejects a dysfunctional relationship to reclaim autonomy. It will undoubtedly force the hand of a fair few breakups.

Already a rising name in drum and bass, and with releases via Atlantic Records, Soave, and Trap Nation, the Vienna-based artist’s ability to dominate from underground to Tomorrowland is indisputable. Forget Lola Young and her excessive media-forced posturing, Madishu is the real firebranded deal.

Owe It to Her is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

‘Oh No’ by Matt Harper Conjured Consoling Catharsis Through Synth Pop Tenderness

Posted on 9 September 2025

If any electro pop track had the anthropomorphic ability to reach out from the airwaves and stroke your hair, it would be Matt Harper’s latest single, Oh No. His approach to 80s-steeped synth pop follows an unfamiliar path, wandering over the universal fragments of suffering that pierce the conscience of anyone still brave enough to care. Rather than glossing over modern ennui, Oh No cradles it, offering a strange validation that allows you to imagine the words of Manic Street Preachers funnelled into a composition by The Human League.

It’s a paradox, really, how the synthesis of synths can feel more humane than the picture of humanity we’re painting in 2025. Harper’s soft, euphonic vocals don’t attempt to dominate the mix; they permeate it with tender indie pop soul, turning this track into something far rarer than disposable feel-good pop.

The Birmingham-based artist has been sculpting his sound since his 2021 debut single, experimenting across synth pop, indie rock, and new wave to build a reputation for cinematic textures and melodies that linger. After producing his own debut album, New Sounds, and reworking his catalogue with Geomagnetic and Ryan Davies for the Collective Custard Dream Remixes, Harper continued to expand his palette. By the time Change the World dropped in 2024, his foundations were firmly set, paving the way for Oh No to receive global acclaim, magazine features, and dozens of radio spins.

Oh No is now available on all major streaming platforms – including Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

FREND revealed the sobering cost of ambition in synth-pop bruiser ‘Price of Progress’

Posted on 3 July 2025

With Price of Progress, FREND swirled up a synth pop meets EBM earworm primed to bruise, not just with sticky Human League-style hooks, but with lyrics that won’t stop needling at your conscience long after the track fades. Right from the opening, those sugary vocal harmonies stretch over space-age synth lines, channelling that 80s nostalgia before snapping you straight back to now with a kick of bass and the cold slap of reality.

Under the shimmer, you’ll find the kind of sharp self-interrogation most pop tracks are far too polite to venture near: “TV’s on almost all of the time, you’re not really watching it” and “have you forgotten about conversation; tell me about your day and the money you’re making.” FREND has mapped the epidemic of isolation with a cartographer’s eye for detail.

The production is unmistakably his own, drawing on Tom Woods’ roots in the UK indie and alt-pop scenes and sculpted through years of collaboration and craft. With each syllable, FREND questions why we’re all so eager to trade away our lives for hollow achievement, making it impossible to sleepwalk through another ambition-chasing day without a twinge of doubt.

If you want a release that holds a mirror up to the everyday bleakness of disconnection and still wraps it up in a glittery package, Price of Progress delivers. For fans of pop who crave a sting in the tail, this is a playlist essential.

Price of Progress is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 
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Review by Amelia Vandergast

Kimi Nickerson flipped the script on feigned kindness in Enemies, a brutalist synth-pop reclamation of power

Posted on 28 June 2025

The beautifully brutal alt-electro pop producer and singer-songwriter Kimi Nickerson laced Enemies with an elegance that masks its lethal impact. Synths swirl like smoke from scorched bridges, strings ache with wounded restraint, and beneath it all, the sub bass and war drums crawl like the slow realisation that the people closest to you were only ever biding their time. There’s no softness in this reckoning, only a scathing refusal to sink to gutter-low levels, because why kill with kindness when the blade of reciprocity cuts so much sharper?

Nickerson’s discography is rapidly becoming an anthology of cinematic self-reclamation. Anyone who finds the key to it will unlock an artist whose profound introspection, merged with her artful synthscapes, gives you the freedom to breathe as an unfuckwithably enlightened entity. In Enemies, she doesn’t play the game, she becomes it, blurred at the edges but razor-sharp at the core. She’s not preening herself into the perfect pop package, she’s digging deeper, excavating aural architecture that stands tall enough to change the whole landscape of alt-electro pop.

Through KG Records, the label she co-founded, she’s already redefining what autonomy sounds like. And if Enemies is anything to go by, Nickerson won’t be shrinking into silence for anyone.

Enemies is now available on all major streaming platforms via this link.

 Review by Amelia Vandergast

Cigarette by Katie Belle Ignites Moody, Synthpop Sensuality

Posted on 26 June 2025

Atlanta’s own Katie Belle lit up the airwaves with her seductive indie-pop stunner, Cigarette. If you thought Taylor Swift went dark with Tortured Poets Department, Belle’s latest track goes one step deeper into moody introspection. From its flickering, neon synth pulses to her breathy vocal caresses, it’s an irresistible, sensuous sulk designed to give listeners way more than a quick nicotine buzz.

Sliding effortlessly between eras, Belle brings flashes of early Gaga glamour into her nuanced electronic textures, confidently marking her own territory. Her voice moves like smoke through shadow, effortlessly seductive yet loaded with a hint of vulnerability; the kind that’s impossible to fake. Cigarette isn’t about playing it safe—it’s about pulling you close and keeping you locked in with a hypnotic chorus that’s as addictive as it is dreamy.

Katie Belle’s been flexing serious songwriting muscle for years, with singles like West Coast and Symptoms earning her a growing wave of acclaim and streams racking up into the hundreds of thousands. Her pop credentials are legit, with Josie Music Awards and praise from the likes of BBC Introducing backing her upward trajectory. Belle’s artistic drive, fuelled by modelling gigs, acting roles, and performances across the States, brings authenticity to every sultry lyric she sings.

Cigarette is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify.
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Review by Amelia Vandergast

Mavi Veloso Queered the Pulse of the Club Scene ith ‘DLites’

Posted on 12 June 2025

Mavi Veloso smeared the club scene in erotic self-reclamation with DLites, taken from the seminal EP Her Blossoming Delights. After a glitchy intro that shakes you right out of your comfort zone, the dancefloor-ready revelation of mind-altering mantras versed through bilingual vocals starts to take hold around the experimental time signatures that ensnare you in the volatile rhythms.

Nothing is safe in DLites, and the innovative siren made that so much more than a design flaw. It’s a thematic device developed to disjoint the dancefloor as she embraces the cultivated chaos of a production that keeps the momentum pulsing through beats sharp enough to make trip-hop rhythms seem on an even keel.

As an anthem of liberation, DLites sensually caresses all the right spots while ticking every box expected from a voice as viscerally ungovernable and ideologically potent as Mavi Veloso. The club aesthetics become entangled with deeper cartographies of transfeminine desire and resistance, conjuring a mythos rooted in personal power and mythic decadence as DLites unravels.

Pulling threads of influence from Brazilian trans icon Cláudia Wonder and reworking her immersive performance art project Her Delights into a sonic manifesto, the Netherlands-based Brazilian polymath made DLites a space for both radical disorientation and rooted liberation. From the deconstructed vocals to the layered glitches and baile funk ruptures, Veloso makes you question where your body begins and the beat ends.

DLites is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast