Like tights, bright colours and tacky costume jewelry, Dragonette has brought music back to the ‘80s

One of the beauties of music is that, like fashion, trends from decades ago are constantly being revisited and brought into the modern age. One only needs to look as far as the new American Apparel ads to see the flagrant ‘80s influence.

The same era is also quite alive in popular music.

New Wave-revival bands like The Killers and Franz Ferdinand have hit it big with audiences around the world, and their popularity has only continued several albums into their careers.

On the poppier-side of things, groups like Duran Duran and Frankie Goes To Hollywood have been replaced by a new, but just-as-slick, generation of artists — one that includes the likes of 2008 Juno nominees Dragonette, formed by Canadian-born duo Dan Kurtz and Martina Sorbara.

Interestingly, the group wasn't always performing super glossy pop music. Sorbara was a moderately successful singer-songwriter, who even landed a spot on one of the Women and Songs compilations, while Kurtz worked as both a musician in several groups (including Que Vida with Andrew Whiteman of Broken Social Scene) and as a producer.

Production wasn't the line of work he initially anticipated, but it seemed like a natural extension of his musical abilities.

“I just remember waking up one day and saying ‘I want to learn how to record music,'” Kurtz said. “That's what my goal was, to be able to record me and my friends and somebody had to learn how to be an engineer. So from that, you spend enough time working a studio, you begin to think you actually have opinions. Then you say, ‘fuck it, I want to make a record'.”

It wasn't long before he got the opportunity to produce albums for some pretty big names. In 2004 he worked with Sarah Slean, and a while before that, he even did an album with the recently-famous Feist.

Now, he's taken on duties as producer for Dragonette, where he's done quite an incredible job on their debut LP, Galore. Essentially, it's everything you'd expect from a record out of the ‘80s — tons of synthesizers, huge choruses, beats you can dance to, hooks that get stuck in your head for hours after listening to it — but updated. It also took Kurtz to quite a different head-space when trying his hand at the album production.

“You can have machines now, especially with digital [technology],” he said. “You can over-meddle with music, which I think I've done in some cases in the past. Like, you can try to perfect it too much, or as we call it, bikini-waxing.”

For all the tribulations, though, critics have praised Kurtz's production, as well as he and Sorbara's writing. Several positive reviews in the UK, and a ‘Best New Artist' Juno nomination in Canada, and Dragonette are well on their way to doing great things.

But with all the hype surrounding the band, one would wonder just how much pressure they're under. “The every day reality of what it's like being in a band is what keeps you grounded,” Kurtz said quite bluntly. “It's like a job that, sometimes it's really cool, and sometimes it's really shit. But however you hype it up, the reality is that everybody's sitting in a van, and right now it's hurling down a mountainside, and we're not sleeping enough and whatever else. So there's no way to put spin on that to make it seem like anything else but real life.

“But we really love what we do... and there will be times where nobody gives a shit about what we do, and there will be times when people love what we do, and we'll have to ride through every incarnation of Dragonette's popularity.”

And those words are unmistakably spoken from someone who truly cares about what he does.

Dragonette will perform at Call the Office on Saturday, March 29. Doors are at 9 p.m.