Lost Girls

An apt, and winning, culmination of Khan's music. As she celebrates the renewal of disappearing into a new identity or the freedom of getting lost in the moment, her visions feel more vivid, and more real, than they have in some time.

The record is elevated by surreal moments and powerful songwriting that could only have come from Khan, whether in the palpable carnality of The Hunger, or the Middle Eastern synth patterns of So Good. She may not have intentionally set out to make this album, but it’s a blessing that she did.

Here, on her most consistent work to date, she’s still dramatic, seductive and theatrical, but fully cut loose. This is Khan’s own heroic moment.

Yes, nostalgia is a fairly generic formula. But listened to as a whole, the album positively thrums with sonic invention, managing to feel both fresh and full of intrigue. Khan once again demonstrates a knack for uncanny storytelling.

Like The Bride, there is a common conceptual thread running through these tracks, but unlike that record, there is less effort exerted in shaping them to fit a narrative. The songs are better for it, each unspooling like a miniature movie of its own without the same need to move the story from point A to point B.

Although at times Lost Girls' nostalgia feels slightly generic, the record does benefit from Khan's ability to weave nuanced emotional portraits--something that imbues an overused retro aesthetic with intrigue once more. [Oct 2019, p.109]

The tunes are getting stronger. [Oct 2019, p.24]

Pleasure and happiness live alongside unease on Lost Girls. Khan is able to pierce through the darkness while still honouring it, and in doing so, acknowledges the validity of her emotions.

Lost Girls is hardly uncharted territory, yet Khan manages to embolden it with her canny narrative, some truly beautiful sonic touches and her trademark gorgeous harmonies.

Overall, Lost Girls ends up as a fun record that luckily, doesn’t overstay its welcome. It has groove and substance as it takes its cues from the likes of Prince, David Bowie, Madonna, Cindy Lauper or Peter Gabriel to name a few.

It’s a vivid world, although less singular or startling than Khan’s previous creations; these touchstones have become so deeply embedded in the cultural fabric that they offer the same comforting glow as an episode of “Stranger Things” rather than the shock of the new.

Even if Lost Girls often sounds like scrapped ideas taken from a larger project, Khan doesn't go too deep into nostalgia—still working firmly within a pop framework.

For the rest of us, Natasha’s first real pop effort since ‘Fur and Gold’ is an impressively lean and infectiously hook-laden romp; doomy disco for dark times.

On Lost Girls, she has come into her own. Her world is burning and she’s willing to go up in flames right along with it.

As a whole, there’s a loose sort of freedom to Lost Girls, as if Khan was able to summon the atmosphere and mystery that so often suffuse her music without sweating over it as much as usual. Her past work has sounded more rooted in the British Isles than Southern California, but she does the L.A. transplant thing with enough confidence that the presence of bloodthirsty vampire bikers doesn’t even sound like that much of a drawback.

Despite being heavily influenced by the 80’s, Lost Girls has a timeless feel and is sonically pleasing.

For the most part, it sounds like something countless other artists could've made, which is the antithesis of everything that made its predecessors so special.

Inspired by a wider 80s film nostalgia, these narrative songs conjure intimate, urgent dialogue and the eruption of the supernatural into the everyday.

There is humour to the harsh, spangly electropop of tracks like Feel For You and Vampires, but in places the concept is a little too arch and pumped up, sounding like a teen Netflix drama. [Oct 2019, p.82]

The overdone synth pop and uninspiring songwriting becomes a bit tiring, so Lost Girls as a whole is a disappointment for a band with so much talent and past successes. [Sep-Nov 2019, p.82]