BUNNY X - Young & In Love
Written by Thorisson with excerpts from our latest video podcast
Exquisite. Spectacular. Breathtakingly addictive. These are just a few words that don’t do Young & in Love justice; it is no doubt one of my favourite albums of the year. I could sit here and write a full-blown essay on why this album is so damn good, but I won’t. Instead, this article will explore a bit of Bunny X’s history—their Italo disco roots and how they got into making synthwave music. What I will say, however, is that Young & in Love is a must-have for everyone. If you’re a vinyl collector, pick it up. If you like digital downloads, get it. And if you’re into streaming, put every single song on your personal playlists, because I guarantee that they are all worthy of a spot.
Despite being pre-dominantly synthwave artists today, your roots lie in Italo disco. Can you tell us a bit about that genre?
Italo disco came about in Europe in the late 70s as a jump-off from disco music. They had all these different synthesizers coming out at the time that a lot of artists and producers were getting into. Which synthesizer they were able to get their hands on depended on what country they were from, so you had all these different sounds coming out from each region of the world. But a lot of what made Italo disco happened through experimentation. We like to describe it as happy-sad music, with a combination of big major chords and sad lyrics. It’s very earnest. It’s very simple, yet very emotional and beautiful music. You had a lot of German, Italian and British artists at the beginning so it was predominantly based in Europe. Eventually it spread to other parts of the world, but it didn’t really reach the USA—apart from a few crossover artists like Baltimora and Laura Brannigan.
Walk us through a bit of your history - how did you first get into Italo disco?
We’ve known each other since 2005 and had always been having talks about doing something musical. Then one night at a party, we met Conrad Kaneshiro who became our producer. I (Abigail) got into Italo disco as a kid because my older brother had tons of records growing up but Mary got into it a littler later. Our first song was If You Say Yes; from there it kind of moved on and come 2015 we were invited to this huge Italo disco Festival in Mexico City, called Patrick Miller Fest. There, we got to perform with some Italo legends like Frank Ventura and Patrick Miller himself. It was an insane moment looking into the audience of around 12,000 people, with half of them singing the lyrics to our songs.
Is it on the agenda to perform at Patrick Miller fest again?
We’d love to! We really need to put pen to paper and get another “banger” out there and see if that connects with the audience in the same way as If You Say Yes.
When did you start shifting towards synthwave music?
We had been listening to synthwave artists like Parallels and FM Attack for years without even knowing that it was its own category. But as for making it ourselves, we just realised that we wanted to try something fresh. We didn’t want to pigeonhole ourselves. We love Italo disco and will definitely continue doing that, but synthwave just felt like such a fresh and active scene. It’s funny to say that though since it is a throwback to the 80s in itself! But the community is young, active and engaging so we wanted to get into that. It was around 2017 that we started to shift in that direction, and in 2018 we released Stay which was our very first synthwave based track.
We also asked Bunny X some quickfire questions.
Favourite musician?
Abigail: Madonna | Mary: Madonna
Guitar or piano?
Abigail: Piano | Mary: Guitar
Would you rather be a cat or a penguin?
Abigail: cat | Mary: cat
How old were you when you first fell in love?
Abigail: 15 | Mary: 17
So there you have it; they were truly young and in love! All these things—and so much more—were discussed in our latest Absynth Video Podcast episode. We recommend taking a look at it for some more crucial information, like exciting things to discover, in New York, the “new“ influencer, and whether Mary and Abigail would rather drink a gallon of hot dog water or eat 6 raw eggs.
