Bat For Lashes - Lost Girls

The Guardian 80

(AWAL)
This has to be Natasha Khan’s most playful album yet, recorded for pleasure in the US and centred around a desert-dwelling blood-sucking girl gang

‘Why does it hurt so good?” feels like an eternal pop question. Followed by the carefree refrain, “You don’t treat me like you sho-ooo-oould”, it could easily be a haunting chorus sung by a 1960s girl group, or a gothic 80s power ballad, or a 00s R&B cut: all sugar and sweetness, delivered from a place of real pain. Actually, it’s the hook of So Good, one of the standout synth-powered pop songs on Bat for Lashes’ fifth studio album.

Pitchfork 72

Natasha Khan's latest is a synth-pop love letter to the ’80s sci-fi and fantasy films of her youth.

The Guardian 60

(Awal)

Development hell has many circles, into one of which fell the sequel to Joel Schumacher’s classic 1987 teen-goth film The Lost Boys; despite several attempts by Schumacher and others, The Lost Girls never appeared.

Enter Natasha Khan, the UK’s premier purveyor of musical spookery, who thought she’d have a bash at making her own version of the film. Somewhere along the line, the songs she’d been working on as the film’s soundtrack took over, and Lost Girls became an album instead. Not development hell this time, but a heavenly accident: inspired by a wider 80s film nostalgia, these narrative songs conjure intimate, urgent dialogue and the eruption of the supernatural into the everyday.