The 80s are not a costume for LOVER. They are a language. On “Technicolor”, he channels the decade’s darker circuitry, the sci fi tension, the analogue melancholy that once sounded like the future whispering through a cracked speaker. This is not about neon gloss or retro fetishism. It is about atmosphere, emotion, and the cold pulse of synthesizers that still feel alive decades later.
His debut “Technicolor” is boldly rooted in 80s electronic sound. Not the radio friendly shimmer, but the darker cinematic current that thrived in late night VHS tapes and half broken cinema speakers. These are arpeggios built on tension, minor key moods, and synthesizers that drift like fog through an empty industrial skyline. You could drop this straight into a VHS Hell screening at Mystic Festival and it would feel perfectly at home, vibrating beneath grainy horror frames. The pulse sits far closer to the ominous minimalism of John Carpenter than to any dance floor glow.
Yet this is not lazy nostalgia. The 80s here are filtered through a Polish perspective, shaped by the delayed cultural shockwave that followed 1989, when Western music and cinema arrived with almost mythic intensity. For LOVER, the decade is less a memory and more an inherited dream, carried through films, games, and stories passed down, then reassembled into something personal.
“Technicolor” feels cinematic because it thinks cinematically. It moves in chapters, in tension and release, like a score searching for its unseen film. Guitars still flicker in the background, a reminder of his rock past, but the heart of the record beats in cold synth lines and shadowed moods. This is not a tribute act. It is a love letter to the darker side of a decade that never really stopped projecting its future onto us.
Now we talk to LOVER about science fiction, sorrow, and why the 80s still refuse to fade into the background.
1) Technicolor is firmly rooted in 80s electronic music. What drew you to that era specifically, and why did it feel like the right language for this project now?
LOVER: Technicolor is definitely rooted in 80s electronic music, but I’d say it’s also got a lot of 70s influence too – those two decades are really the golden age for electronic sounds if you ask me.
Even though I grew up in the 90s, the culture from the 80s and 70s was everywhere: movies, books, music, and games. That stuff really shaped me. I think the 80s especially were obsessed with science fiction, and you could hear it in the soundtracks and see it in the stories told in books and movies.
All those influences stuck with me, so when I started working on this project, that era just felt like the right language – it’s what I grew up with, what resonated the most, and it still feels meaningful now.
2) When you think about the 80s musically, which artists or composers feel foundational to LOVER, not just as influences but as a way of thinking about sound?
LOVER: There are a ton of artists and composers who shaped my taste, but it’s John Carpenter who stands out above the rest.
He’s not just an amazing composer, but also a landmark director, and what I love is how he went against the grain – while everyone else was doing these big orchestral scores trying to echo what John Williams does, he kept things super simple, just using synthesizers and keyboards as he couldn’t afford an orchestra, even if he wanted to do a more classic score.
Carpenter didn’t have formal musical training, and neither do I, so that straight-from-the-gut simplicity really speaks to me. Carpenter’s music works perfectly with his films, and I’ve always admired his confidence to just do it himself.
His soundtracks, like Halloween and The Thing (co-written by Ennio Morricone), are iconic – minimal, ominous, and the main themes are instantly recognizable 40-50 years later. It’s kind of like what punk did for rock: stripping things down, making it accessible, and showing that you don’t need to be a virtuoso to create something powerful.
That’s the spirit I try to channel in my own compositions – I am certainly not the most skilled, but I know what I feel and what I want to say with my music.
3) The 80s are often reduced to aesthetics and nostalgia. How do you personally define that decade, what does “the 80s” actually mean to you as an artist?
LOVER: I didn’t get to live through the 80s myself, but I definitely felt its impact through all the art and culture that came after.
It’s funny how those shifts in culture take time to really resonate, but I feel like I was shaped by the 80s anyway. For me, that decade means sci-fi, horror, and electronic music – movies like Blade Runner, Predator, Terminator, Aliens, and soundtracks from artists like Jean Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream, and Vangelis.
Even now, so much of what’s popular is reboots or sequels from that era, so the nostalgia isn’t just personal, it’s everywhere. I think the 80s were a decade of big change – the sounds, the colors, the artistic style all shifted.
Even though I didn’t live it firsthand, it feels like I did, just from growing up surrounded by its influence.
4) For you, were the 80s more about optimism and futurism, or about anxiety and unease? How does that duality appear in your music?
LOVER: I don’t think the 80s were just about optimism or just about anxiety – every decade experiences both sides, with optimism, futurism, and also anxiety and unease.
There isn’t a decade that’s a globally good time; each faces its own problems, whether wars, cultural movements, economic collapses, or diseases. After global events like the Vietnam War and the Cold War in the background all this time, the world was still recovering and shifting. It still does in a way.
From my Polish perspective, the 80s were delayed because of the Soviet Union, and the real impact of Western culture came after 1989, making it feel even more exhilarating and joyful when it finally arrived.
The duality of the 80s – optimism and unease – appears in my music as a kind of romantic reflection of that era, shaped by stories told by my parents and their excitement of Western music and cinema after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
5) The 80s were a time when electronic music was still experimenting with futurism and uncertainty. How did that atmosphere influence the emotional direction of the album?
LOVER: I have always been drawn the beauty in sorrow, melancholy, and sadness, rather than their joyous counterparts.
For me, major scales and electronica don’t work well together, so the album leans into darker, more ominous, and underground influences – especially those from John Carpenter’s scores and the darker side of 80s culture, rather than the mainstream dance-oriented music of the era.
I see a clear distinction between the colorful and sparkly dance culture and the more mysterious horror and science fiction-inspired sounds, and my fascination is with the latter.
Take the success of Modern Talking and A-HA – it creates a natural cultural response, a need for providing immediate contrast to those lighter dominant styles, much like how punk emerged as a reaction to progressive rock.
My affair with the 80s represents the opposite spectrum of 80s dance culture. Gotta be careful what you mean when you say you like 80s music!
6) Much of Technicolor feels cinematic, like a soundtrack to an unseen film. Were there specific 80s films or soundtracks that influenced you, and did you approach the composition with imagery or narrative in mind?
LOVER: I am happy that you say that it feels cinematic. It does, because the instrumental nature of the music naturally projects itself as imagery, even though there was no intention to provide a cohesive narrative or concept album per se.
While specific 80s films and soundtracks, already mentioned earlier, influenced the vibe, the album isn’t built around a linear story or characters.
Instead, there is a structure and dynamic of emotional ups and downs, and when arranging the tracklist, I approached it as if organizing chapters of a movie or story to create an engaging rhythm to what could be a story.
The flow respects the need for introduction, exposition, and momentum, so the album unfolds gradually, revealing its moods and sound palette, and that really emerged organically during the creative process.
Natural progression of happy accidents is closer to the truth than claiming to have had a clear vision form the start.
7) Coming from a rock background, what led you to step away from guitar driven songwriting and fully embrace electronic composition?
LOVER: It wasn’t really a self-aware process because the album was put together over many years, quite unconsciously, with no intention of writing an electronic album in the first place.
I just had these electronic track ideas in between more regular rock and metal songs for other projects. Only after a bunch of years did it dawn on me that I really wanted to do something with it, and I was still putting such tracks together, so I could tell the fascination wouldn’t go away and it wasn’t just a whim or a one-off track that was different.
Later, it became a more intentionally driven process to actually make something of it.
As I was talking about cultural phenomena immediately followed by their antitheses, like progressive rock versus punk rock or 80s disco music versus horror soundtracks, I think it was the same for my approach to the guitar as an instrument, which I know quite well and which dictated how I used to think about music and composition.
Every instrumentalist tends to lean back on similar patterns and habits, and as much as it’s still fun, sometimes I found myself repetitive and uninspiring because I would revert to the same concepts and way of thinking about music.
Electronica unpacked a whole new universe of opportunities to let yourself go and be inspired by other things.
Only later did I buy myself a keyboard, and that was an eye opener because when I take the guitar, I have all this prior knowledge and experience, and I start thinking before I play.
With the keyboard, which I don’t play very well, it’s easy enough to plug it into software and start getting inspired by the sounds, play with the knobs, and randomly hit the keys to construct chords I would never think of if I knew what I was doing.
There are a lot of happy accidents with electronic music for me, and it’s just so much fun and so different than what I got used to, so it’s great.
But there is quite a lot of guitar on this album, too, so I think I was in some transitional phase when writing these pieces.
8) Is your relationship with the 80s rooted in discovery, things you found later, or in memory, music that was already part of your life growing up?
LOVER: I think both.
As I said before, I didn’t experience the 80s myself, but it was really present in the 90s and early 2000s when I was just a kid growing up. I never grew tired of my inspirations from that time.
The falling in love was gradual, though. First, I loved the movies, like Star Wars, which was my introduction to science fiction and space opera, but it didn’t have electronic music in it at all.
Later, my dad played me Jean-Michel Jarre, and my dad-in-law played me Tangerine Dream.
Then my girlfriend at the time, now my dearest wife, showed me the game Mass Effect, and the music in it was just brilliant – very cold, atmospheric, electronic, and it worked with the narrative so well.
That was when I realized I loved electronic music, and I’ve always tried to emulate some of that Mass Effect vibe in my own pieces (shout-out to amazing composers Jack Wall and Sam Hulick).
Because I was also shaped by the rock scene, I often borrow some composition guidelines from the rock playbook, like having intros, verses, choruses, or solos.
There are plenty of things I draw from my memories as a child and teenager, and I still do because this nostalgia keeps coming back.
I don’t really draw a line between past and current inspirations – they just keep evolving with me as I age, and there are a lot of things from the early years I carry with me through life.
I guess I don’t mature too fast!
9) Creating music so strongly tied to a specific era can be risky. How do you respond to the idea that 80s influenced electronic music is often labelled as nostalgic?
LOVER: I don’t mind nostalgia, so I’m fine with the label, but the risk is that you are accused of just copying somebody else’s work.
Said, I would disagree if someone said my album Technicolor is just an attempt to recycle what 80s music was about.
Of course, it’s heavily influenced by it, and I’m trying to make that 80s musical culture resonate from my album, but I do believe there’s a certain factor I added in these compositions that makes it my own.
It’s my first album like that, so it’s too early to talk about a specific sound or style, but I’m hopeful it will emerge as I keep writing.
The 80s is one basket I borrow from, but there’s far more to what I am as a listener, fan, and artist, and I think all these things will keep resonating in the music I write.
Hopefully, there will be bits and pieces that, in conjunction with the 80s vibes and the horror/sci-fi cinematic aspect, make it distinguishable, original, and fun to listen to.
I’ve never found it fun to listen to cover bands, and I would hate to be labeled a cover band for 80s music.
Lover is not trying to be that at all – it’s a love letter, an homage, with enough respect not to steal from it, but to be inspired and figure out which piece of myself I can reshape with these experiences and mold into something that’s characteristically mine.
There are plenty of projects out there that just emulate exactly, but I have no intention of being one of them.
I’m curious myself what Lover might become as this journey goes on, and I’ll keep trying new things to keep it fresh and interesting for myself, because at the end of the day, the first listener and fan I need to cater to is myself, and I can be quite demanding and serious when it comes to music! 😉
Talking with LOVER, I found myself nodding more than once. I’m a child of the 80s, born in 1972, so for me that decade was lived in real time. It was great cinema, great music, some truly questionable hairstyles, and artistically, a wildly interesting era. What strikes me about Technicolor is not that it tries to recreate that world, but that it understands its contradictions. The beauty and the unease, the futurism and the fear. That balance is what made the 80s compelling in the first place, and it’s what gives this record its quiet strength.