Contemporary artists of all stripes are looking to the 80s for direction: from The Weeknd’s pitch-perfect invocation of 80s radio hits to Mitski’s glittering embrace of synth-pop drama, it’s clear that the decade represents a deep vein of inspiration for both songwriters and producers.
Some artists’ adoption of the 80s aesthetic may be skin-deep, simply another stylistic detour to tick off the list for an oversized, genre-hopping blockbuster album release. Many others, though, are driven by a fascination with the era that’s anything but superficial, finding something of themselves in a period they could only experience second-hand.
Dominic Gore is one of those artists. Driven by a complex and deeply personal enchantment that goes beyond mere nostalgia or gear fetishism, he absorbed the decade’s vibe through cultural osmosis, channelling The Pet Shop Boys, John Carpenter movies and the black humour of J.G. Ballard into music that reimagines 80s synth-pop through contemporary methods, forgoing Jupiter-8s and analogue tape in favour of Arturia plugins and Ableton Live.
“I love a lot of music from the 80s – I’m not quite sure why that is,” Gore tells us. “There’s something about the songwriting. It’s not about the synthesisers so much, even though I do love the sound of all that stuff… there’s just something about the mood that’s permeated into my consciousness.”
We caught up with DC Gore following the release of All These Things to dig deeper into these influences and hear more about the creative process behind his densely layered, darkly comic new album for Domino Records.
cm: Could you tell us a little about the background to this album?
: “I was in a band before this. Basically, that band dissolved, and at the end of that time, just as I was really getting stuck into working on this album, lockdown hit, and changed everything in terms of the way we could put stuff together. It then became very much a process of trying something a bit different. I didn’t have access to
