Nightdrive with You

French producer Anoraak brings italo-disco's architectural clarity to bear on something more emotionally earnest in "Nightdrive with You," which feels like a love song that has been translated through several electronic idioms and arrived better than it started. The production is notably clean — high-definition kicks, precisely gated snares, synthesizer arpeggios with the kind of perfectly tuned decay that suggests a producer who spent considerable time on a single parameter. Beneath this precision, however, runs a genuine romantic current that keeps the track from feeling clinical. The vocal takes the material at face value, delivering the lyrical conceit — the specific intimacy of shared car space at night, the city passing outside windows, conversation made easier by the fact that neither person has to sustain eye contact — without irony or protective distance. There is something specifically French about this treatment of sentiment, the willingness to be earnest about simple pleasures without converting them into something more sophisticated or defended. The synthesizer lines catch the light the way sequins do, quick flashes rather than sustained illumination. "Nightdrive with You" is music for the passenger seat, for watching streetlights strobe past the window and feeling, without explanation, that everything is exactly right.