Sylvan Esso: Sylvan Esso [PSYCHIC HOTLINE]

Why you'll love it

This Psychic Hotline reissue dresses the debut up with a gold foil logo on the cover and an obi strip. The album reached No. 39 on the Billboard 200 and No. 4 on the Top Dance Albums chart, powered by "Hey Mami," "Coffee" and "Play It Right."

This edition

• Gold foil logo on the cover
• Obi strip

About the album

Pair a folk singer with an electronic producer and you might expect a polite compromise. Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn came up with something much more fun: crisp, bouncing beats under a voice that can make a single syllable sound like a dare.

The songs came together in 2013, and the singles came in pairs. "Hey Mami," built on layered vocal loops and a rumbling bass line, and "Play It Right" arrived first, then "Coffee" and "Dress" in early 2014. "Coffee" borrows a little of "Hanky Panky" and turns it into a wistful, slow-motion dance, while "H.S.K.T." and "Could I Be" show how much warmth Sanborn can coax out of a laptop. Meath and Sanborn wrote it all themselves, with nods to Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich on "Coffee."

Metacritic's critics gave it 77, AllMusic called it club- and café-ready, and it kept showing up on the year-end dance album charts for two years running. By late 2014 it had sold 39,000 copies. Good for the dance floor and the kitchen, though we'd advise against doing both at once.

Also at Kops: more Sylvan Esso on vinyl · browse Electronic

Tracklist

Listen

On Partisan / Psychic Hotline (cat# PSY-012), a reissue of the 2014 album.