Rational Youth

Rational Youth came together in Montreal in the summer of 1981, when synthesizer players Tracy Howe and Bill Vorn, both devout Kraftwerk disciples, decided the future ran on oscillators. Keyboardist Mario Spezza soon made it a trio, and the band has since been counted among Canada's very first synth-pop acts.

Howe had already done a tour of Montreal's underground. He sang and drummed for the punk band The Normals, then did the same in Heaven Seventeen (no relation to the English Heaven 17), a punk outfit that was early to pick up synthesizers and had a future Men Without Hats founder, Ivan Doroschuk, on keyboards. Howe even played guitar in Men Without Hats before he and Vorn struck out on their own. Only their second real engagement had them opening for Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark in Montreal, and their first single, "I Want To See The Light", came out in 1981 on the independent YUL Records.

Cold War Night Life, from 1982, wears its obsessions in its song titles. "Dancing on the Berlin Wall" is a chilly, danceable pulse that sounds like a party thrown under a searchlight, and "Saturdays In Silesia" sounds like a grey weekend somewhere far to the east, synths glowing like streetlamps on empty boulevards. The original run ended in 1986, though the name flickered back to life at various points until the end of 2021.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.