Plastic Hacks is the sonic imprint of identical twin songwriters rerouting nostalgia through a toasted MIDI cable. After nearly two decades apart, Brandon and Bryan Peach are back in sync—one programming beats and synths, the other shaping melody and lyrics. It’s part bedroom pop, part post-punk residue, built from warm pads, glitchy textures, and harmonies just a bit out of phase. Think New Order with sidechain compression and fuzzy bass, or LCD Soundsystem raised on AOL and youth group trauma. Their songs hum with digital sheen and analog ghosts—pop music that clearly remembers being human.
Plastic Hacks’ debut LP, Fabulously Melancholy (for Friend Club Records, out May 9), drifts in like a memory you didn’t mean to keep. The album threads together glitchy rhythms, harmonized voices warped by circuitry, and melodies that never quite resolve the way you expect. There’s warmth here—but it’s the kind you feel standing near an old CRT screen, humming in a dark room. Fabulously Melancholy loops through disconnection and desire, from the pill- counting self-interrogation of “Medicine Cabinet” to the recursive pep talk of “Get It Together!” to “Meet You in Chelsea,” a postcard from someone too beautifully sad to reply.
The songs don’t ask for resolution. They flicker. They repeat.They try to hold it together—and sometimes can’t. A record for anyone who’s ever stared at a read receipt too long and called it reflection.
“My songwriting process most often begins at synthesis, sound design and programming,” says Bryan Peach about “Eight Straight Days of Fresh Hell.” “But I woke up one morning with this exact bouncing, round bass groove in my head, so I graciously accepted the gift and used it as the backbone for the rest of this track, courtesy of a Roland Juno-6. The cello-and-violin string ensemble that swells joyfully in the first verse becomes dishonest, almost cloying, as the narrative unfolds. My favorite thematic turn on the song is when the staccato, reverbed stabs of the glasslike sequence that bolsters the front half of the track take an ominous pivot toward the relative minor key about midway through. We want to take the listener, sonically and thematically, on a beach vacation with Plastic Hacks—where the intentions are pure, but the outcome uncertain, ending in a lingering fadeout that answers nothing but asks everything.”
