Portsmouth three-piece Magnetic Skies are injecting new blood into the electronic pop scene. Their second album Fragments is a well-conceived update of a now venerable style. Robert Plummer enjoys the noise.

It sometimes feels as though electro-pop is a genre with a great future behind it. Classic 1980s synth tracks are often infused with a sense of wonder for the digital world to come. Little did their creators know where it would all end, 40 years on: with the machines threatening to swallow human creativity alive as AI eats technology’s lunch.

Someone needs to restore the balance, give electronica a human face again – and Magnetic Skies might be just the people to do it. First and foremost, they have supreme mastery of their craft. Glacial washes of sound, juddering bass, keyboard riffs that hang suspended in space: here is a band whose familiarity with all the time-honoured techno-tropes is never in doubt.

But it takes more than simple competence to win the day, so can they put that expertise to good use? Fortunately, yes: this is no mere revival act, confined to pastiches of the past. At their best, their music has a euphoric weightlessness that lifts the listener and instils optimism, even when the lyrics address more sombre themes.

After Goth-tinged opening instrumental No End, the slinky, insidious Place On Earth gets the album properly under way. “I want some space to find real life again/I want redemption from the scream,” sings frontman Simon Kent. It should be depressing, but the whole sonic confection is such a hook-fest that all gloom is banished.

Back To Life presses home the advantage, picking up the pace with a propulsive forward motion and a soaring, anthemic chorus. “We are made of stars, we are meteor showers,” croons Kent as the melody cruises into the stratosphere.

Closing In varies the texture once again, sporting lush, layered production and distinct Italo-disco overtones. Band co-founder Jo Womar joins in on backing vocals, turning “Arm me with light now” into an unlikely but delicious Euro-pop refrain. That’s followed by Your Shadow, a rumbling darkwave excursion featuring a post-punk bassline and keening synths that scan the soundstage like searchlights.

Perhaps the record’s most overt homage to Eighties pop is Slow Motion, which sounds as though it should have its own video in heavy rotation on MTV. “I’m in a foreign land and never coming back,” run the lyrics. Don’t they always say the past is another country?

However, the time warp effect doesn’t last long. Can You Feel The World? brings us bang up to date with treated industrial percussion and synthetic guitar riffs, sounding a bit like latter-day Depeche Mode. “We’re losing the world we knew,” laments Kent – a sentiment many people can probably share these days.

Nonetheless, Magnetic Skies are still mindful of the need to avoid wallowing in doom, as the next two songs make clear. Resilience is now the watchword: “When it all comes through, I see the light in you.” That leads on to the album’s most joyous moment, Everything’s Alright, a sparkling love duet between Kent and Womar: “I can see it in your eyes/The world has come alive.”

Fire Escape is a drifting, dreamlike, gravity-defying moment of digital delirium. Kent is “holding [his] breath, suspended in air” while entertaining visions of forbidden love (“I know I shouldn’t talk to you”).

The last and longest song, She Calls Me On, finds Magnetic Skies at their most Cure-like, with a recurring melancholy piano phrase and a mood of cavernous longing. For a languorous, tantalising six-and-a-half minutes, Kent is a man on the brink of an emotional breakthrough. “I feel you more with every breath, I feel your every move, and I’m not alone,” he intones.

It’s a hard trick to pull off, but this band have managed it: while evoking the heyday of chart-friendly electro-pop, they still sound fresh and relevant for modern times. It helps that they never lapse into robotic android clichés, emphasising humanity at all times. Strong tunes and impassioned vocal performances never go out of style – and Fragments is an album that’s far more than the sum of its pieces.

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You can find Magnetic Skies online at https://magneticskies.com/. You can order their album on Bandcamp here. They are also on Facebook here and on X here.

All words by Robert Plummer. More writing by Robert can be found at his author’s archive. He is also on X as @robertp926.