Art in the 2010s is rife with stories that start in a chat box. From “Catfish” to Yo Gotti’s “Down in the DM,” the concept of love and courtship bubbling and blooming remotely, over the internet, is increasingly commonplace. Tenderness, the third album by the experimental pop duo Blue Hawaii, situates itself in this new sub-genre of romantic art. Musically and lyrically, it attempts to recreate the headspace and “challenges of handling relationships online”—the isolation, the miscommunication, and lack of physical presence.
The album is the duo’s first in roughly four years, and it picks up where their last album, 2013’s Untogether, left off. A self-described breakup record, Untogether was written while Raphaelle Standell and her creative partner Alexander Kerby were separated: She was touring with her rock band Braids and he was off living in Europe, soaking in club culture. The sound that separation produced was cold and spectral and filled with echoes. After completing that album’s tour cycle, the two split yet again, putting Blue Hawaii on hiatus while Standell returned to Braids and Kerby split his time between L.A. and Berlin, learning how to DJ and produce dance music. They started working together on Tenderness last year during a period when Standell was in an “intimate relationship” that was being conducted mostly over instant messaging.
The pieces on Tenderness are all love songs about the digital age, and in order to tell these stories, sonically speaking, the two set out to create a whole new sound. Where Untogether was frigid and ghostly, the Blue Hawaii of Tenderness were remade for the dancefloor in mind. Perhaps half-jokingly, they’ve taken to describing their new direction as “Björk meets the xx and DJ Koze.” While there is some credence to their description—the combination of instrumental colorfulness and diaristic intimacy on Tenderness speaks to this—they’ve pulled a lot more from the golden age of house and disco.
This is especially clear on songs like “No One Like You,” which is constructed around an instrumental sampled from Kenix’s 1980 disco classic “There’s Never Been (No One Like You).” The two have added even more light and color to Kenix’s boogying bass and drum line with horns and wiggly synths. Standell, who is the group’s main vocalist, channels the house divas of yore with brassy, sweet, and bellowing delivery. The song establishes many of the album’s main instrumental themes—horns synths, flutes, and four-to-the-floor beats—which creates a breezy feeling throughout. On the opener, “Free at Last,” techno kick drums and blasts of saxophone make for a well-sculpted club beat. Elsewhere, as on “Versus Game,” they reinterpret fluttering ’80s synth pop, and Standell’s protean voice handles the shifts seamlessly. Overall, the production is excellent, and the sound design of each of the album’s songs is thoughtful and tightly constructed. Instrumentally, the two know how to set the mood just right, striking a balance between joy and ennui.
Lyrically, Tenderness can be pretty shallow. If these are songs about disconnection and misunderstanding, the lyrics don’t do a great job of fleshing out the concept. Most of the songs are built on platitudes (“I wanna be dancing in the moonlight/I wanna be dancing by your side”; “Searching for you/You had me waiting”) that don’t particularly evoke text-message flirtations or digital loneliness. In between the songs, a handful of skits and field recordings attempts to create a sense of manufactured intimacy. The best of these is “Big News,” a voicemail set to sleazy nightclub beat. But for the most part, these little interludes are forgettable, and Blue Hawaii struggle to give Tenderness a narrative that would makes their concepts feel more substantial. Still the warm, well-wrought pop of Tenderness is by far the group’s most enjoyable collection of songs.
