When their 2023 album Good to Me started gaining traction internationally, synthpop sweethearts Shannon Curtis and Jamie Hill were faced with an unexpected question: how to extend their typical one-year album cycle while not interrupting their favorite couples activity — making recordings together.
Their answer was to start working their way down a list that they had been keeping since they first met in 2006 — of songs from their 1980s childhoods that they thought it might be fun to someday record their own versions of.
But where most artists attempt to put their own spin on cover songs, Curtis and Hill took a different approach: they attempted to recreate as closely as possible the feeling in the original recordings.
The one twist: Curtis would be lending her soaring alto to a collection of songs sung originally by men.
The result is an album of reverent renditions of all-time classic 80s synthpop songs, in which the recordings are faithful to the exacting details of the original versions — but which also somehow manage to add up to what sounds for all the world like a seamless debut album from an electrifying new artist.
80s kids is a remarkable record. Each song sounds simultaneously period-appropriate and modern; exactly like the original, but also brand new. Curtis and Hill deftly hit every one of the molecularly familiar emotional notes that fans of 80s music expect from these songs — but more often than not hit them more satisfyingly than the original artists did.
