Drive 12"

The Italians Do It Better compilation assembled around the Drive soundtrack moment — the film’s actual score drew from previously released Chromatics and Desire material on Jewel’s label, and this 12” is the label’s document of that orbit: a snapshot of the IDIB roster at the point when retrofuturist cinematic synth-pop briefly became a dominant aesthetic in a particular corner of indie and electronic music.

Johnny Jewel’s whole project — Chromatics, Glass Candy, Desire, Symmetry — is essentially Italo disco filtered through Tangerine Dream filtered through David Lynch, arriving at something that sounds like a genre that didn’t exist in 1985 but has invented its own past. Single-handedly responsible for the “synthwave” microgenre that built itself around the aesthetic a few years later.