Practiced Lines
French Inhaler tap into a corner of the 1980s that today’s revivalism often skips. Our collective memory of the decade tends to favour what came later: huge production, booming drums and an aesthetic so recognisable it can now be reproduced almost on command. Practiced Lines reaches for the stranger period just before that, when post-punk was slipping into early synth-pop and electronic instruments had not yet become synonymous with excess. That in-between quality gives the Chicago trio something more interesting than nostalgia, and the way the album was made almost accidentally completes the idea. Recorded over three days at Westtown Magnetics in Chicago with engineer Brooks Hannon, it was tracked entirely to analogue tape. New reels were too expensive, so the band used tape left over from another session. Some of what had previously been recorded survived, resurfacing as slowed-down and reversed fragments across the album. It is a wonderfully imperfect detail: somebody else’s past literally leaking into their present. In an age when technology promises clean upgrades, instant deletion and endless new versions of ourselves, Practiced Lines comes from a machine that remembers what was there before. That feels particularly appropriate for an album concerned with technology, performance and emotional disconnection. Live bass and drums sit alongside analogue synthesisers without turning the exercise into period reconstruction, while the limitations of the recording process become part of its identity. Perhaps that is why the early 1980s reference works so well here. French Inhaler are not trying to recreate a decade, but returning to a moment when our relationship with machines still felt uncertain and unresolved. Four decades later, surrounded by algorithms, curated identities and permanent online presence, that uncertainty has hardly gone away. The technology changed. The question did not.