Lust for Youth

Crystalline, slick and glistening, this feels like the last piece of a puzzle slotting into place, the tying off of any loose ends. It’s the sound of a band operating firmly, and finally, in their comfort zone.

Lust for Youth may not have made any personal great leap forward with this album, but it remains a set of glorious synth-pop gems, with an aching heart at their centre that most can only dream of.

While Lust for Youth proves that the duo is among the best acts updating synth-pop for the 21st century, it also suggests that it might be time for Norrvide and Fischer to broaden their horizons once more.

The brevity of Lust For Youth is an issue, particularly as the eight songs fail to fully bond together, so the end result is a little too disjointed and the album overall suffers from a lack of flow, immediacy and purposeful direction. There are some good tunes here, of that there is no doubt, but it feels a little flat as a body of work.

The gloriously mopey sound of new wave might be novel to Norrvide and Fischer, but there's not much here that stands out in synth-pop's always-crowded field. In a sense, that's fine; Lust for Youth wear this sound well. But Lust for Youth shows they might have escaped coldwave’s dead end only to settle into a rut.