The One Eighties

Photos: Crystal Kelly

There is nothing quite like waking up, pouring a coffee, and thumbing through the tracks that were submitted overni– Whoa! Talk about a throwback to the days of disco! Raleigh, North Carolina’s The One Eighties have reached way back into the ‘70s with their new one, “No King.” While you might be able to detect elements of disco in a cornucopia of modern recordings, this cut will straight-up prance around your ear drums in platform shoes amidst a crowd of strings, horns, and that steady, four-on-the-floor beat!  The kicker is that it completely works!

Without drawing aimless comparisons to Blondie or ABBA or dropping more genre-appropriate names, we will tell you that Autumn Brand’s vocal work serves this song very well. Paired with co-writer Daniel Cook’s multi-instrumentation and backing vocals, it is enough justification for a deeper dive into the duo’s preexisting repertoire. There are two bass players listed in the credits, so we do not know whether to thank Casey Toll or Mark Hill for that buttery groove that smears the ears around 2:07.

The One Eighties add, “This was an exercise in futility that we couldn’t bring ourselves to abandon. We were going through a disco phase and thought we’d try a Bee Gees meets ABBA tune. We wound up with an insane track count (nearly 400), which we mixed ourselves. It landed in a place that’s pretty far afield from the other music we’d been making, but we liked the direction so much that we wanted to explore this side of us further. The song is about standing up for yourself to confront an oppressor, and a reminder that all power is fleeting.”

“No King” gets the UpToHear seal of approval straight out of the gate. We’re willing to bet that it will get yours as well:

-TM