Post Sex Nachos: Familiar Pop Laced With Digital Nostalgia
When I listen to music, I create visuals. Woven through the lyrics and laced with my own dramatic flair, every new song I listen to becomes associated with a vision. Post Sex Nachos’ latest single, “Sound Of You”, is a familiar and colorful late-teenage montage of memories: college dorms and color-synced speakers, late nights with pop songs coming from another room, and music festivals where people were lost in the sea of each other, yet all moving in a universal understanding of the feeling.
In a more concrete description of sound, “Sound Of You” screamed two words to me: Jack Antonoff. From start to finish, the blend of sounds felt touched by pop’s most prolific producer in his myriad eras. I mean this as a compliment; Antonoff has curated some of the most popular sounds of our modern generation and has solidified a staying power in the music he’s been a part of. More than a fad, the sounds that I hear in his work and this single have a quality that moves past the algorithm of the season.
The introduction of the song, a dreamy wash of distorted notes that melds into modulated vocals, sent me back into the memory of an open dormitory window and a Bluetooth speaker cascading digital color pixels to the introduction of “Rollercoaster” by Bleachers. It’s a fade in without force, a gentle inhale before the initial drumbeat that kicks off the flow of the song. Then it’s easy listening with a touch of digitalwave nostalgia, (there, in my memory, is the image of a late night walk through an all-but-empty student union, lonely but for the distant sound of music drifting through the speakers in another locked off section), with a simple beat that anyone can bob their head to, and a chorus of about 9 words: “I can only pick out the sound of you”.
Outside of the Antonoff touch I find in the verses, I hear a touch of Djo’s wistfully alternative pop in the chorus. Like the inescapably soft and catchy Djo song, “End of Beginning”, “Sound Of You” has a chorus that is easily memorized, and if you weren’t singing along by the first chorus, there’s no doubt that you’d be able to the second time around.
Make no mistake, to call this song simple is not an insult. Pop music, by nature, is popular in a way that transcends other genres. It becomes pop, and popular, by being something universally understood. It’s a sound that can be heard around the world, a sound you can envision being sung by hundreds of thousands of people back up to the stage at a festival. Pop does not need to reinvent the wheel to be good, it simply needs to connect.
Around the same time as the other memories of mine this song brought back, I attended a music festival hosted at my university, packed with names I’d never heard before and surrounded by faces I’d never seen. Despite walking into the crowd feeling entirely out of my element, by the second and third chorus of the headline act, a thousand or more were bouncing and moving in unison, smiling and singing together without care of who knew the words going in or who had just learned them on the spot. There was a connection in that crowd that only music can produce, and pop music has mastered the art of fostering that connection.
All this is to say, the same way that I learned to chant and move to the music then, I can completely see Post Sex Nachos achieving that with “Sound Of You” now. This is a sound that can cross musical preference and get a crowd singing, like any good pop song should.
“Sound Of You” by Post Sex Nachos is available to stream now.
