Cure For Youth "Synthetic World"

LA post-punk quartet Cure For Youth arrive with their debut LP "Synthetic World" on à La Carte Records — twelve songs, thirty-five minutes, no fat. Scott Savarie, Catarina Teles, Connor McKenna, and Nicolas Sturz make hook-heavy post-punk pressed through enough reverb, chorus, and delay to widen the room without losing the snap of musicians who learned their phrasing in the pit. The lineage runs through Joy Division at its sharpest and lands like Ceremony or The Men once those bands worked out what to do with their tempos: songs that know how to slow down without losing tension and how to speed up without losing the melody. Thematically, "Synthetic World" sits in the present tense — modern life as a problem of attention, loss as the thing that arrives without permission, the political weight that any honest record made now has to carry without flattening into commentary. Recorded and mixed by Alex Jacobelli at Sunsick Studios in LA and mastered by Andrew Oswald, the album sounds close enough to feel personal and roomy enough to feel inevitable.