Ford & Lopatin

Daniel Lopatin, also performing at this year's Hopscotch Festival under his heady ambient drone alias Oneohtrix Point Never, flexes some very different muscles as one half of faux-'80s pop duo Ford & Lopatin. The Ford in question is Joel, of Brooklyn band Tigercity, who's been making Prince-ish make-out jams with his main band for years now. The musical interests of these old friends and counterintuitive stylistic collaborators seem to intersect at synth-drum heavy commercial pop that could be retroactively smuggled into The Karate Kid soundtrack. That You Can Play, an EP the duo released last year under the working name Games, featured soft-focus vocals alongside spry and propulsive synth patterns. Bristling with charmingly goofy immediacy, this work couldn't be much more different from the chilly remove of OPN.

Even though, in the fashion of mid-'70s Yacht Rock crooning tandems, they've renamed themselves Ford & Lopatin, this pair still toys with '80s electro. "Emergency Room," the lead single from the duo's first full-length album, Channel Pressure, sounds like the sort of song those tiny retro drink-serving robots might play if given a chance to DJ. The vocals practically trail sparkle dust with each sung syllable. It's definitely stranger than the Games material—a little high-toned and glitch, in a way that's not entirely dissimilar from the terrific oddball British pop made by Max Tundra. "On the way to the emergency room, ambulance, inertia, I'm OK. Although I'm dinged up, voices are going away," goes the chorus, repeating blankly on loop, non-plussed in the face of calamity. The smooth glide of the song brings pharmaceutical-grade repose, counteracting panic in waves. The album itself is about "a teenage anti-hero [Joey Rogers], violent robo-jocks, and a record industry run by a super computer." Now that's a story worth hearing. —Jeff Klingman