明晚丨哥本哈根合成器(流行)唯美主義者 First Hate丨預售即將截止

First Hate’s A Prayer for the Unemployed finds its way into the world on Escho, the Copenhagen independent label that first released—and whose owners continue to manage—Iceage. And while perhaps it’s a little unfair to hold up a debut album as emblematic of anything, it does seem to neatly encapsulate how the city’s underground scene has changed over the last half-decade. Back in 2011, Copenhagen was all angry young men making visceral punk and industrial music that spoke its intent through cryptic lyrics and heathen runes. But that period lasted for barely a blink of an eye. Before long, Iceage’s singer Elias-Bender Rønnenfelt was exploring plaintive synth music in Vår, and Hannes Norrvide had embarked on the long road to transforming his former solo project Lust for Youth from misanthropic noise into a sort of romantic Balearic boyband.

And now there is First Hate. A Prayer for the Unemployed finds Anton Falck Gansted and Joakim Nørgaard building bright, synthetic pop music from yearning melodies, sparkling Euro trance keyboards, and padding club beats. One obvious touchstone is the Pet Shop Boys, with whom First Hate share a taste for smartly observed vignettes of complicated love and metropolitan living (and you sense Neil Tennant might see an album title like A Prayer for the Unemployed and happily claim it as his own). But they still have the sense of a band who rehearse in Copenhagen’s graffiti-plastered practice space Mayhem, and part of the appeal of this record is in the tension it draws between DIY practice and pop sensibility, juxtaposing underground temperament with choruses that soar.