by Colin Joyce
Chromatics
"I Can Never Be Myself When You're Around"
Via SoundCloud
To promote their 2012 record Kill For Love, Chromatics made a poster that re-imagined the record as a feature-length film directed by their auteur, songwriter/producer Johnny Jewel. In the intervening years, their work has only become more intertwined with that medium. After loaning tracks to the soundtracks for Drive and, uh, Taken 2—not to mention Jewel's score for Ryan Gosling's directorial debut—it's become imminently clear that the band has a love of cinema. But even if you've missed out on all of those extramusical nods to the movies, the grand sweep of their latest Dear Tommy single lays that affinity bare.
"I Can Never Be Myself When You're Around" picks up the glitz of Chromatics' other shimmering synth-pop explorations, but makes them more widescreen than ever before. Singer Ruth Radelet's typically heavy-lidded tale of romantic anxiety is bolstered by breathy backing vocals courtesy her Italians Do It Better labelmate Megan Louise, from Desire. Coupled with that choir of distant wispy vocals, Jewel's soft focus synth lines and regally thumping kick drums are pure lightheaded melodrama, fizzing and swooning like the shoegaze-adjacent records that M83 made early in their career. Jewel has explicitly made Themes For an Imaginary Film before, and with "I Can Never Be Myself" he's doing the same a little more abstractly, and to even more devastating effect.