Warm Brother

With their debt to foundational ‘70s electronic music like Kraftwerk and NEU!, Digital Leather is firmly in the second, retrofuturist era of synth punk. But Warm Brother doesn’t play as nostalgia. That’s partly because the band lacks almost any of the crushing paranoia that is omnipresent in the genre. In fact, their whirring and warm synths make the music sound expansive and welcoming. That leaves the songs, whether dirge-like (“Crown”) or propulsive (“Photo Lie”), as anthemic and life-affirming – a welcome rarity for synth punk.