There is a little child inside me, a kid who used to play Contra with my brother, a kid who used to scream “OVER NINE THOUSAND” as I cosplayed Vegeta from Dragon Ball Z with my friends in their lounges. And without a single flinching muscle, when the opening instrumental of “Good Morning L.A” from Dreamkid’s latest album reeled up in my ears, with that classic news report and the synthetic sunrise sounds burning into my brain, I was taken straight back.
With his sophomore record, Daggers, Durban-raised synthwave muso Dreamkid (real name Ryan Morris) has designed a magnetic assemblage of fourteen tracks which cover everything from LA surf punk culture to ’80s video games to fight movies and toxic relationships. But here, Daggers also rises with a kind of maturity that soundtracks intimate and personal memories from the artist’s life.
As one of the first synthwave figures to go viral on TikTok, it’s the music that Morris makes which provides a refreshing soundtrack to today’s faux ’80s movement of all things retrowave.
Working with Pete Maher, the UK’s top independent mastering engineer (U2, Peaky Blinders, The Pixies, The Rolling Stones), the album traces pop sounds with a production quality not often seen in the DIY production scene of synthwave. There is a smorgasbord of menacing retro-electro instrumentals, screaming guitar solos and Dreamkid’s own brand of vocal driven emo-synth-pop (or what he likes to call blinkwave).
Third track “Chrissy” (the artist’s de facto instrumental viral hit, released as a single back in June 2023) had me thinking back to classic movie scenes now ingrained in my mind – mechs transforming into cars saving the world in slow motion, and my backward cap, skateboard enthusiast friends and I on a slip-and-slide watching the sun going down.
The soaring synth bass line and cascading melody of “Take Me On Tonight”, a collaboration with Metro Station’s Mason Musso, tells the story of a relationship that’s done a complete 360°. “It’s about trying to restore an old relationship that didn’t work out because of mistakes you made,” says Morris. “It really is a feel-good song though, so hopefully it’ll give people that little bit of hope that they need to fix a broken relationship.”
Morris has certainly unlocked the synthwave formula for the millennial memory bank, building electric chords and hard rock vocal threads with ease. The instrumental designs of “The Highway” and “Alleyway Fistfight” never stray far from the Mitch Murder-esque stylings of retrowave of old, such that Dreamkid has created a brilliant kind of time capsule of ’80s neon ballads and smokey, synth-layered themes.
Dripping with new-age graffiti and hyper-pop, I think I wanna play Contra again.
