30 years after their debut album Please was released to international acclaim, the Pet Shop Boys drop their latest brilliant electronic pop masterpiece Super that beats as an ode to their house music roots with a nod to today’s youth generation.
Picking up where their best selling album in 20 years, 2013’s Electric left off, the Pet Shop Boys choose to continue working with producer Stuart Price (The Killers, Madonna) for what is the second album in a planned trilogy with him. Lead singer Neil Tennant explains, “We wanted to make an album that had a very strong electronic mood all the way through it. It felt like Electric had been a sort of ‘rebooting’ of the Pet Shop Boys, reminding ourselves that we came into this whole thing because we liked electronic music.”
Keyboardist Chris Lowe added, “But we did know that we were going to work with Stuart Price again, so we knew the sort of record that we would all enjoy making together. So we were sort of aiming toward that goal. And then Neil at one point said ‘we want to make it Electric but more so.’ So it was going to be even more electric than Electric. That was the idea.”
The lead single, “The Pop Kids,” tributes the house and rave sounds that helped propel the Pet Shop Boys to become a defining dance music act. Lyrically the track takes one back in musical time, “They called us the pop kids, cause we loved the pop hits, and quoted the best bits, so we were the pop kids.”
Furthering their throne as dance music royalty is another stellar pair of single bundles for “The Pop Kids.” One features the excellent “Offer Nissim Drama Remix,” who will be spinning the main event at this year’s White Party Palm Springs. While the other bundle features “The Full Story” version which brings the story of “The Pop Kids” up to the present.
“Twenty-something” has a Casio-sounding electronic element built around lyrics that lament of how much harder it is to survive today, both emotionally and financially. Selfies and the reality-TV based 20-somethings then get dressed up “to go out, and live beyond my means” in another house-infused room-filler on “Groovy.”
Struggles and challenges of modern technology rarely make it into pop music, but with ease the Pet Shop Boys bring tearful emotion for the machines that supposedly improve our lives 24-hours everyday on “Sad Robot World.”
Subtle in nature, it is the classic sounds of the Pet Shop Boys meeting today’s EDM on “Say It to Me” that will undoubtedly become one of their fan-favorites for years to come if not become a bona fide hit 30 years into their unexpected career.
On the first listening of Super it would have seemed mostly unmemorable. But as is frequently the case with the Pet Shop Boys, the collection of songs grows with each listening until it sonically explodes into its own masterpiece which is exactly what the duo is creating with their planned super electric trilogy.
I’ve been listening to one or two of the tracks available pre album release and I have been thinking this is going to be bigger than Nightlife!-Great review and I agree that every time you listen to one of their new albums they just get better-Life long fan
Thanks Chris! Hope you enjoy the whole album once you buy it. Since writing this for LGBT Weekly, I have really grown to love ‘Say it to me’, which is rumored to be the second single. I am also hearing they are planning to do a remix album for Super. Which once you listen to it, you will hear that these songs could be much much longer. Hope you enjoy.