Twin brothers Christoph and Anton Hochheim may be best known for their work in The Pains of Being Pure at Heat and The Depreciation Guild in the early 2010s, but it was their involvement in the Captured Tracks label’s output of that era that best defines the sound of their collaboration Always You, which initially launched a decade ago under the moniker Ablebody. Their work mines a version of dream-pop that harkens back to the age of chillwave rather than the current shoegaze trend, with a sophisti-pop sheen only deepening the sense of nostalgia on their upcoming third album, Against the World. That project’s second single, “1994,” may provide the record’s most explicit commentary on nostalgia, blending dream-pop and ’90s dance music with the easygoing sounds of Wild Nothing and Beach Fossils (with whom the Hochheims currently play) with perhaps a bit of “Steal My Sunshine” in its pep.
“‘1994’ is a song about clinging to specific times and seeking refuge in them, often to moments that never really existed,” the duo shares of the track, which—like the rest of the album—was produced by Wild Nothing’s Jack Tatum. “We live in a world that deals nostalgia as currency, where the past is constantly viewed through rose-tinted lenses, with our youth put on a pedestal and the continual quest to return to that version of ourselves always just out of reach. We long to return to the simpler times before life pulled us from each other and ourselves, before our hardships and tragedies calloused us to the world, back to a time that only ever existed in our minds.”
Embrace the nostalgia with the video for “1994” below, and pre-order Against the World ahead of its November 13 release via Hit the North Records here.
