Future Unlimited

It’s a been a few months since I posted Future Unlimited’s “Lightweight Eyes,” so tonight I’m happy to see the Dunkin’ Donuts-powered Nashville duo put up some new music. ”Haunted Love” isn’t a Halloween-themed song as you might expect based on the timing of the release, but it does give you a bit darker, more romantic feel than it’s similarly retro predecessor. Both will live on a future Future Unlimited release this Fall, so keep your eyes and ears peeled. In the meantime, scoop up the “Haunted Love” download for free. - soundisstyle

If you waited to throw your Halloween party on the actual holiday, then your saintly patience is rewarded with a new song from Nashville synth-pop duo Future Unlimited. Though not as frightening as, say, “Monster Mash”, “Haunted Love” has that vital undertone of impending doom to its blend of slow-burning New Wave synths and sporadic drum crashes. Bump this one at your ghoulish get-together and enjoy the sight of Mitt Zomney slow-dancing with “That Gangam Style Guy”. - Consequence of Sound

Nashville is quickly releasing a handful of 80's flashback artists, i’ve found 3 good ones in the past couple months, I don’t know if it was the Drive Soundtrack or Cut Copy just reached Middle America, I really adore this one from Future Unlimited. - ISO50

Future Unlimited
We've been lightheartedly calling Future Unlimited "gilt-wave", not because we get off on being genre taxonomists, but because the Nashville duo is too cunning for any other name. Their day-glo synths and pop vocal production are straight '80s, but they touch on something much more mysterious, seamy, and forlorn -- like looking at all the lavishness of the Reagan-era through a thick, 21st century lens. Sultry moods, arena hooks and a shoe-in for a spot on the 'Drive 2' soundtrack.
Jeremy D. Larson -- Content Director, Consequence of Sound - AOL Spinner

The blog world is one of the noisiest environments you can imagine. With everyone shouting all at once, it’s like trying to get noticed across the room in an Ibizan super club – no easy thing. One method for bands to get to the front of the queue is to get referred to us by a fellow music blogger. We don’t just mean by them posting it upon their respective blogs, we mean real referrals, where they actually approach us and directly suggest we listen to a band they’ve uncovered. It’s something we’ve experienced a few times and it’s always a winning way to get our attention. If a trusted source points someone out, then we’re highly likely to listen straight away. It’s about trust. It’s about a network. It’s about knowing they wouldn’t waste your time. It’s like everything in life, when someone you know understands you and they make a suggestion then you’re more likely to take the time to investigate it. Well, today’s Recommendation is one of those referrals, and it’s a absolute fucking diamond.

E.J. Friedman is known as the man behind the established US music blog, Loudersoft, from Memphis, Tennessee. He recently got in touch, as he’s now on board as the manager for a new duo from Nashville, called Future Unlimited. He’s in a prime position to help launch their careers, particularly with the first stages of the duo’s all important hype and industry traction – which most artists usually obtain online. He reached out a few weeks ago giving us a secret snippet of what the duo can offer, demanding that we keep it under wraps until things were ready for the full online onslaught. We duly obliged and upon hearing them we too immediately fell in love. You can see why EJ was frothing at the mouth with excitement, this is a duo with a global appeal, particularly in the UK and Australian markets. They’re trusting EJ to utilise his relationships in order to fuel the buzz, and it seems he’s been having to hold on tight as soon as the rumours began to spill out. Fortunately for us The Recommender was considered as the right place to have the UK debut outing, alongside Consequence Of Sound, who should have the US exclusive on this same day. He apparently also had a few (much) larger sites knocking on the door for this, so that gives you some perspective regarding the excitement already surrounding this pair, but he kindly stayed true to his promise to us.

And so to the duo. Pretty much zero seems to exist online about them before today, as they build up to the launch of their first songs, via a project they appropriately named the Cloak & Dagger EP, which is planned for a release on February 29th. They’ve deliberately held any specific details back in order to splash as loudly as possible when ready. As we speak, some tunes on the EP are still being mastered, but we have at least two ready and on show for you below. One half of the band, David Miller, relocated from New York’s East Village to Nashville, where he moved next door to up and coming Nashville DJ, Samuel D’Amelio. In a rather endearing chance meeting the two of them first bumped into each other during a noise complaint between neighbours, something that we’re pretty sure won’t be happening when the pair eventually take this show on the road together, as they find neighbours more likely to ask for it to be turned it up, not down. They combined over a love of the mainly-British 1980s futurist synth pioneers, such as Depeche Mode or Gary Numan. As their band name suggests, they seem to reflect a period in cultural history when aiming high was the order of the day, when winning was what mattered, when only fools talked of limits.

As you would imagine their music is heavily synthetic, reminding us of the UK band, Mirrors, with the same stern, perfectly placed keys that echo off the walls throughout each tune. The first track, Golden, struts confidently into the neon room, like the good-looking kid gliding into the club. The whole thing pulses wonderfully, like street lights as y - The Recommender

My first question to Nashville gilt-wave synthpop duo Future Unlimited isn’t about their love of everything ‘80s, their excitement about opening our inaugural CoSigns event in Austin, TX, or whether they get sick of being compared to Cut Copy. It’s about Drake.

“Oh, God,” Samuel D’Amelio says. “That’s a whole different world.” D’Amelio, who has been DJing at clubs around Future Unlimited’s hometown for six or seven years, recently hosted the Toronto rapper at his newest residency. “It was actually like a test night,” he tells me over the phone from the apartment he shares with his bandmate, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Dave Miller. “Everything was going all right, and then at 12:45, some guy runs up to the booth and is like, ‘Drake’s coming here!’ So, I’m like, ‘That’s fantastic!’ What I didn’t realize was that Drake was coming there with his entire entourage, 120 people.” After replacing D’Amelio with his own personal DJ, Drizzy and his posse proceeded to turn a “members-only, tuck-in-your-shirt crowd” into a dance party where guys “with pants around their ankles” popped off Cristal.

So, was D’Amelio disappointed he couldn’t spin for Drake? “Oh, hell no! It was really fun to watch. I just hunkered down in my little booth and ate pizza.” His easy-going attitude reflects the circumstances surrounding Future Unlimited’s beginnings, which began with a noise complaint that luckily turned into a friendship with Miller, his former upstairs neighbor. That apartment’s thin walls also contributed to the duo’s musical partnership: “I was laying down some tracks, and then I heard someone running down the stairs to my apartment, and he’s just like, ‘Holy shit, man! You like this kind of stuff?’” D’Amelio says, Miller laughing in the background. “And then we just started trading tracks constantly.” (When they finally did move in together, the band recruited their bassist to live in the apartment next to them to avoid less fortuitous noise complaints from the neighbors.)

That was before Miller realized there might be more to D’Amelio than he thought. He found out the disc jockey was doing “more than just spinning tracks” when Miller heard him writing a score for Bank of America in his apartment. “He composed the whole thing himself, and it was just unbelievable. Here I was, chasing my dream of being a drummer, and he’s at the opposite end of the spectrum, pulling bangers in the club.” Future Unlimited’s self-released debut self-titled EP is a glittering example of how these opposites attract. From the bouncy 1, 2 step of “Golden” to “Easy Ways”’ exquisitely distressed soundscape, D’Amelio and Miller almost out-synthesize their early 1980’s predecessors and aforementioned Australian soundalikes.



Not a band to get territorial or defensive, D’Amelio and Miller respond that they “love the fact that people think we sound like Cut Copy.” In fact, D’Amelio says, “The first time we heard Cut Copy, it reminded us of New Musik, like [band member and producer] Tony Mansfield. He did Naked Eyes, he did Phil Collins, he did a-ha. We just kind of draw on the influence and go with whatever we’re feeling.” Future Unlimited has been feeling enough to record 18 to 20 tracks in addition to those already on their EP, which emulate the gamut from Gary Numan to Inez. Plans to include these other songs on a later full-length are in the works, but D’Amelio and Miller are in no rush, taking the time to make a name for Future Unlimited. “All this is new to us, you know, all of the blog stuff and whatever. We’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing. We don’t want to put a bunch of bullshit out there.”

So far, they have nothing to worry about. D’Amelio’s Labyrinth-ian synthpads on “When It Calls”, decadent enough to make the Goblin King proud, swirl around Miller’s knife-edged tenor. His voice holds the song together, effortlessly skirting a traditional climax with simple lyrics that are by turns yearning and hopeful (“I can see it on the - Consequence of Sound

We’ve already heard two tracks (“Golden” and “When It Calls”) off Future Unlimited‘s debut self-titled EP. Today the full five-track collection is available for stream (below) or download (from the band’s website). What a nice way to follow-up their SXSW performance during Consequence of Sound’s CoS Cosigns Party day last Wednesday. - Pigeons & Planes

“Maybe what we’re craving isn’t meant for us to have,” sings vocalist Dave Miller on the EP opener, “When it Calls,” and in many ways this EP seems to have been built around that line. Each song expresses a different flavor of restlessness and discontent and something of a solution, but the Nashville group is generally content to leave things expressed instead of explained. Their songs defy satisfying climaxes and catchy choruses, content to let mood rule the day, never placing too much importance on any one event or element in the song. It’s an aesthetic which seems to comply with Miller’s question and answer on “Into the Sun,” “So, what is left? Just a memory.”

The songs, thanks to their distinct aforementioned eighties characteristics, all have an apparently similar sound, yet they each hit at different emotional registers. “Golden” swells and builds energy like someone finally unloading some repressed sentiment in one crazy night, but whatever satisfaction that brought fades away by song’s end, like a drug trip winding down late in the night. “Flashing lights and the wild nights / Only you and the thought of dreams that spread. / And we all know that’s it real inside your head.”

‘Future Unlimited’ demonstrates a willingness to experiment in order to achieve fuller expressions of complex emotions…

While the instrumentation on “Golden” very much lives up to the promise of its title, the song before it creates a much darker atmosphere. An electric guitar grates across the chorus of “Easy Ways” and roaring synths swell up and disappear like a craving for whatever easy ways the character in the song is running from. “It’s got a hold, it’s got a hold on you,” cries Miller over one crescendo, but we’re taken straight back into the relentless beat that came before that declaration. The words have no lasting effect on the mood of the song, and the listener is left with a twitching beat that builds to a point and then simply dies.

Both “Golden” and “Easy Ways” have an M83-esque, almost soundtrack feel to them. The music works with and against the open-ended lyrics, giving the songs a sonic fullness and complexity which offer a sharp portrait of a vital emotional life. In other places on the EP though, Future Unlimited don’t seem to quite achieve that same sense of unity.

“Into the Sun” and “The Coast,” the last two songs on the EP, simply aren’t as interesting as those before them. They both would be at home in that fantastical convertible mentioned earlier, but that message tires easily—you’d be skipping those tracks by the third or fourth play cycle. The chorus of “There’s a chill in the air, there’s a sparkle in the eye” and the relatively vanilla production, in comparison to the rest of the EP, do not give enough to the listener.

While those two songs indulge too much in hazy, chill wave vibe, it’s still hard not to be excited about Future Unlimited. The EP demonstrates a willingness to experiment in order to achieve fuller expressions of complex emotions, and that is to be applauded. ––Matt Conover - Pretty Much Amazing

Nashville, TN duo Future Unlimited thrive in their ’80s fetishism in a way that few others do. The homage just sounds so natural, so right. The flashing synths, insistent drum machine, and dance floor grooves draw comparisons to Cut Copy, but the biggest link between the two bands is the ease with which they reproduce the feel of a different time. Some bands are influenced by genres or eras, and Future Unlimited is one that instead seems possessed.
Dropping this album into the hands of one of the characters in The Breakfast Club probably wouldn’t throw off the music continuum. Opening track “When It Calls” rides in on a twinkly synth wave, but the real hook is that chunky bass line that sounds like it came straight out of Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”. The heavily reverbed toms and light handclaps that power “Into The Sun” act as the perfect counterpoint to the bleary guitar picking and harmonies. When Samuel D’Amelio and Dave Miller sing out lines like, “Out of the rain/into the sun/we can run/one by one,” it’s with that hopeful escapism that worked so well in the great melodies of the ’80s.

The five songs on the Future Unlimited EP have a massive scope, aiming for big themes and tones that wind up busting even at those far-flung seams. “Easy Ways” opens in epic, lock-step bursts of distorted feedback, but even something this abrasive can be reeled into an ephemeral, sugary ’80s pop world by musicians this focused. The darkwave bass and angelic synths that propel the rest of the song intermittently get bashed at by that feedback, but the cool intensity of the vocals cannot be disturbed. “You’ve got to let go of the easy ways,” they intone, leading to a cathartic mass of howling guitar. Throwback rarely feels this genuine, a real accomplishment amongst so much nostalgia. - Consequence of Sound