Did you know there are young fans of every retro pop genre you can name and those sounds are still being actively created today? New wave, disco, and funk are being made right now by artists and gobbled up by fans who weren’t even alive when any of it was first popular. I got properly introduced to the world of 80s New Wave when I stumbled onto Valley Girl, a forty-year-old movie I had absolutely no business loving as hard as I did. Leather minis, vibrant colors like the whole decade was daring you to stare, eyeliner stacked high enough to have its own zip code. All that feeling running completely wild with zero apology for any of it. The synthesizer textures underneath every scene were doing this enormous emotional lifting, filling up all the space the characters refused to fill with actual words. That is the world Flight To London lives in on ‘Elephant,’ and if you haven’t heard it yet, you’re sleeping on some totally awesome shit, and yes, I know I’m writing like a Valley girl.
‘Elephant’ sits in the feeling of being trapped in a relationship where something is deeply bogus and nobody will say it. The tension has been living in the room for months and everybody is tiptoeing around it because saying the thing out loud might be the moment the whole thing falls apart. Jimmy McGorman and Robb Vallier loaded up a Moog One and a MiniMoog and started layering textures until the atmosphere was thick enough to touch. The result is a dense, pressurized soundscape that breathes the way a conversation breathes when nobody will start it. Every layer is doing active emotional work, and it’s fucking radical.
Advertisement
Okay so the first verse? Fer sure one of the most relatable things I’ve heard in a minute. “Time stands still when hearts don’t break / the second hand will start again / stop and start again.” I have BEEN that person. Just frozen, watching a relationship go cold in real time and doing absolutely nothing about it because doing something felt worse than doing nothing. Then it gets more fractured and way more specific: “A careless fall, a child afraid / seasons we can’t explain, can’t explain / more questions than answers / a twist in the ending / more questions than answers.” The repetition is doing something righteous here. When your brain is locked in that loop around a problem it refuses to solve, it just keeps running the same track. McGorman and Vallier wrote the actual feeling into the structure itself. Wicked songwriting, full stop.
Okay wait, I have to tell you about the chorus because I genuinely lost it. The narrator has been doing what we all do, eyes forward, pretending the weight isn’t there. And then: “When I come face to face with the elephant in the room / (I’m barely breathing, the weight of the feeling) / there’ll be no empty space for an innocent man to move / (wish I was dreaming, walking in my sleep).” That parenthetical layer running underneath the main lyric is mondo clever as a production choice and I am not okay about it. The top line names the confrontation. Underneath is the body completely falling apart, barely breathing, wishing it could just check out. And then hold on, because this line wrecked me and you need to sit with it: “I close my eyes to blind mistakes / but this time I don’t wanna look away.” This time. The whole song bends on those two words. Looking away was the default before. This is the moment the pattern finally breaks.
Verse 2 goes somewhere almost biblical and I was not prepared. “When heaven calls, I watch my sins / tear apart the house we made, house we made.” The shared life being dismantled by guilt while the narrator just stands there and watches it happen. That repetition of “house we made” keeps folding back like the mind cannot let go of the scene. Then the deflection finally runs completely dry: “A secret pain carved in stone / when no one else is left to blame, left to blame.” No more pointing outward. The accountability lands. These two wrote a song about finally owning your mess and made it sound so fucking beautiful it should be illegal.
Flight To London is Jimmy McGorman and Robb Vallier, and their résumé explains immediately why this sounds so goddamn good. McGorman has spent over two decades as a songwriter and producer working alongside Avril Lavigne and Goo Goo Dolls among others. Vallier’s credits include Sabrina Carpenter and Dave Stewart. They first crossed paths at Berklee College of Music twenty years ago, twenty years, which is wild, and then spent the next two decades watching their compositions get handed off and reworked by other artists, vocal changes and lyrical rewrites they had zero say in. The frustration eventually had to go somewhere.
Advertisement
Their debut album Instructions For Losing Control is where it landed: a project they call “NEW-stalgia,” built on the emotional immediacy of Tears For Fears and Depeche Mode but arriving fully in the present tense. The partnership with Moog Music, which led to the Face To Face with Flight To London documentary and The Moog Sessions EP, put a semicircle of synthesizers in a room at Revolver Recordings in Westlake Village and gave them two days to go as deep as they wanted. Moog Music President Joe Richardson said they “bring out the best in the music and the best in the instruments.” No shit. The duo added that collaborating with Moog “has been a real honor.” You can hear every bit of that in every layer of this track.
Back to Valley Girl. Julie spends the whole movie pretending her relationship with popular and safe dude Tommy is fine when she knows deep down that it actually feels kinda grody. The elephant has been in that room since the opening scene. She just keeps circling it because naming it means losing everything she thought she wanted. That’s the same trap ‘Elephant’ is about, and Flight To London understand it at a molecular level. McGorman and Vallier built something enormous out of that moment of reckoning, wrapped it in Moog synthesizers that feel like the 80s dreaming about right now, and made the confrontation sound like the most bitchin’ thing you could possibly do with your pain. Julie eventually throws Tommy’s bracelet out the window and drives off into the night. The lying to yourself part ends. ‘Elephant’ is the song playing in her head when she does it.
And here’s the Valley Girl trailer because why the fuck not?
