Nation of Language: A Way Forward — an elevated level of expression

Nation of Language are a Brooklyn trio born from the failure of another group. Singer and main songwriter Ian Richard Devaney used to be in Static Jacks, a New Jersey indie-rock outfit that had a record deal and handsome prospects that never materialised. “I came for you but you’re not there,” Devaney sang on their second album. The message got through: Static Jacks folded.

Devaney had a rethink. Inspiration struck with a stray encounter with Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “Electricity” — the UK synth-pop classic from 1979, often played in Devaney’s household when he was growing up. After swapping guitars for synthesisers, relocating to New York and recruiting Aidan Noell as keyboardist, Nation of Language were born.

A Way Forward is the follow-up to last year’s debut Introduction, Presence. Devaney and Noell, now married to each other, are joined by bassist Michael Sue-Poi, also formerly in Static Jacks. The album takes its predecessor’s stylised mix of optimism and angst, with vigorously driven songs about people suffering “second-hand malaise”, and proceeds to bring it to an even more elevated level of expression.

It opens with “In Manhattan”, a neatly pitched tribute to New York, that most musically storied of cities. “Strung along by a fiction, read it in a magazine,” Devaney intones in a low, brooding voice. His words are not so much strung as swept along by a fast sequence of notes from a synthesiser arpeggiator, a crucial tool of 1980s electronic pop. The magazine must be an imported back issue of The Face, not The New Yorker. “In Manhattan, you cannot have it all,” he cries.

Yearnings that cannot be fulfilled recur in the album, articulated in songs that make you want to listen again: a perfect pop loop. “The Grey Commute” reorients Kraftwerk’s techno-pop positivity into a denunciation of late-capitalism’s rat-race. “Consume and collapse/It’s violence,” Devaney cries. A catchy motorik beat maintains a Kraftwerkian sense of progress despite the gloom. “Former Self” finds the singer being confronted by an accusatory younger version of himself amid more arpeggiated synths and a slow electronic bass line. A beeping sound pulses like a submarine as he sinks into a handsome abyss of despair.

Connections are drawn linking European new wave and synth-pop to New York bands of more recent vintage. The manic night out depicted in “This Fractured Mind” smacks of LCD Soundsystem, while the taut bass and washes of guitar feedback in “Across That Fine Line” resemble Interpol. The precise angular attack of The Strokes can also be detected; their drummer Fabrizio Moretti guested on Nation of Language’s debut.

Much could go wrong with these ingredients — the mannered singing, the retro-styling, the high seriousness — but they come together to highly impressive effect. OMD’s “Electricity” is an apt activating agent. The hit is a paean to solar power that derives its musical energy from Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity”: it is a work of recycling in the best sense. A Way Forward manages a similar trick, a generative act of creation that reaches back across the generations.

★★★★☆

‘A Way Forward’ is released by PIAS