Synthwave Sunday: Mitch Murder, Interceptor

For more info on Synthwave Sunday and why we’re doing this, click here. 

Chances are that if you use the Internet in the year 2015 you’re already familiar with Mitch Murder: he’s the Swedish synthwave artist who wrote the David Hasselhoff-performed “True Survivor” and much of the rest of the Kung Fury film soundtrack on which it appeared.

But Murder’s brand of synthwave is a bit different than the stuff that’s been captivating the charred, rotting hearts of metalheads for the past few months. Whereas the likes of Perturbator, Dan Terminus, GosT, Mega Drive and others’ hard and heavy beats and dark, angular synth stabs make constant allusions to metal — and many of those artists have gone on record as saying their music is profoundly inspired by this site’s genre of choice — one gets the impression that Mitch Murder’s formative years really were spent listening to new wave and radio pop, not the Metallica, Slayer and Ozzy records whose liner notes we all poured over obsessively. That’s just conjecture and I could be wrong, but Murder’s sonic palette — and the fact that he’s been in the game as long as anyone, having released his first EP in 2009 — is about as clear a distillation of pure synthwave as you’re likely to find.

More than just a particular sound, every synthwave artist worth his weight in Colombian cocaine has his own image, not just a visual aesthetic but a certain time, place and feeling they’re trying to invoke in the listener with their jams. Mitch Murder’s world is one of slap bass, washed out strings and copious amounts of glorious, glorious synth tom fills, and the result sounds like a mix of every ’80s TV theme song you’ve ever heard, the creepy soundtrack of Twin Peaks and “Who’s That Girl” by Madonna. How’s that for specific? As for what feeling he’s trying to get out of you… I’ll leave that to you.

Murder has approximately 10,000 EPs available on his Bandcamp page, but the “major” albums released by record labels are up on Spotify. Interceptor, his latest to make it to the service, is embedded below, right underneath the appropriately 16-bit music video for album’s title track and the appropriately VHS one for his 2013 track “Breeze.”