The last song on Chris Olsen’s second full length LP Dark Ride shares the same name as Twinkle’s hit single,“Terry,” from her 1964 album Golden Lights——a ‘death disc’: a half-forgotten phenomenon of the 50s and 60s which saw songwriters penning songs on a love interest’s bitter and premature death. “The British government had to ban them,” Olsen notes, “But they were made from a really earnest place. I was obsessed with them.”

Olsen’s new record is seeped in the history of pop music——it’s out now with a limited CD release via Orange Label Records. Across the album he samples from charts ranging from pre-1930s to the 80s, crafting songs haunted by crooners of days past that pull you into a hazy, near future. Dark Ride is a gleeful and heart bearing singer-songwriter effort that is very easy to listen to; a surprise, as peering through its polish reveals dark subject matter and experimental, intricate production.

“That’s the best thing about pop music to me, it’s this thing that can be ultra-complicated and really deep, but not inaccessible. That’s something really important to me, that’s a life guider of how to treat people also,” Olsen says.

Playing a range of instruments, both physical and synthesized, Olsen finds as much inspiration in the harmony and structural complexity of Scott Walker’s catalog and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds as he does from Oneohtrix Point Never’s modern textural electronic music. Now 23 years old, the New York raised, Los Angeles based musician and visual artist is piecing together his view of the past in the way only one who grew up on the internet could.

Dark Ride is the follow up to his 2024 collaborative album with Sam Cooper, and 2022’s Human! Sound! —> & or the Record I Could Never Finish (even if I Wanted To)——listen to that here.

Olsen was featured on the hallowed Matador Recommends Spotify playlist with his debut 2020 EP //Nointernetdinosaur—listen here.

INQUIRIES