OH! channel Tangerine Dream and Human League on all-analog debut We Come In Peace

The deliberate choice to record entirely on analog hardware is not nostalgia; it is a position. For Massimo Paramour and Gianluca Pighi — the Piacenza-based duo who release under the name OH! — that choice is the founding thesis of We Come In Peace, their debut full-length, and it explains everything about why the record sounds the way it does: warm, wired, and uncannily present.

Sixteen tracks, all of them assembled at Elfo Studio without a single sample or digital shortcut. What Paramour and Pighi built there is less an album than a transmission — a signal aimed at the same frequencies that Tangerine Dream and the Human League were broadcasting from in the early eighties, received now, in this decade, with all the fidelity the original broadcasts only half-achieved. The analog chain is not an affectation; it gives the record its texture: the slight drift in a synth oscillator, the physical attack of a drum machine that isn’t quantized to perfection, the warmth and hiss that modern production quietly eliminates. In their own words, Paramour and Pighi describe the album as “a love letter” to those forebears — read, pointedly, with the accent of today.

That contemporary accent comes in part from the roster of vocalists assembled from across the globe. Local Suicide, Sarah P, Tareq, and Alexander Price each bring a distinct geography and register to the record; the production does not homogenize them. Each voice carries its own story, its own cadence and context, and OH! stitches them together without erasing the differences — which is, it turns out, the concept embedded in the title. The collection sounds like a world’s worth of transmissions landing in the same receiver at once.

The range is deliberate and unashamed — “radiofonico but without fear,” in the duo’s own framing. “Crush” operates at the nervier end of the post-punk dial: a tight, mechanical groove beneath synth lines designed to loop inside your head long after the track ends. “Falling,” by contrast, is unabashedly pop — open, melodic, lit from within, with a chorus that the Human League would not have been embarrassed to claim. That both tracks belong on the same sixteen-track debut is OH!’s argument: the line between club floor and headphone listening, between rigor and accessibility, is one that analog production quietly erases.

We Come In Peace is out now on streaming platforms via Huldigung Records.

Tags: music-en1, synth-pop, analog recording, Gianluca Pighi, Human League, Local Suicide