Gunship - "Unicorn"

Need a new wave of synth-filled awesomeness?

Unicorn released on September 29, 2023; ahead of its release, I spotted it on a list of upcoming albums on Wikipedia. I almost added it based on the album art and name, alone.

I should have.

But that’s the densest part of the year’s release schedule, so I skipped it.

Then I met somebody.¹

A friend of a friend got pulled into our Music League — a fellow metalhead who happily gushed with me about Sleep Token’s Take Me Back to Eden. Yet, she then named this album as her AOTY frontrunner.

Color me curious.²

Gunship is a relatively young act — formed in 2014, with their first album dropping in 2015. Unicorn is only their third studio album, a full five years after 2018’s Dark All Day. And they lean hard into one of the most musically distinctive decades: the 80s.

And I’m not talking just mimicking the 80s vibes. This is the most 80s music you’re gonna find in the 2020s. They got Tim Capello and John-Fucking-Carpenter involved. Unicorn is their second collaboration, each, with Gunship; both legends have worked with the band previously already, but Unicorn is the first album to feature both.

Unicorn is hardcore Synthwave. The entire album is energy and intensity; when the BPM drops, the atmosphere swells to compensate. If you aren’t familiar with Synthwave, it takes the synth-driven Pop Rock of 80s New Wave, distills that down into a concentrate, then infuses it with Techno vibes and House beats.

The result is this lively, vibrant, energetic electronic atmosphere. But on Unicorn, there’s also an undercurrent of darkness running throughout the album. It isn’t often detectable in the instrumentation,³ but it reliably crops up in the lyrics.

The album is also rife with features — of the 14 tracks on Unicorn, only five don’t feature at least one other artist. These range from the aforementioned presence of Cappello and Carpenter to fellow electronic/synth artists Carpenter Brut and Powerglove to Electropop vocalist Lights (who is a personal favorite), among others. Best of all is that, from Lights’ vocals to Cappello’s epic sax, every feature feels additive. They blend seamlessly into the song they’re featured in, but also bring it forward, leaving the impression that the song would be worse without them.

And there’s not a bad song in the mix. Even the five which Gunship own wholly on their own are incredibly solid.

The album’s throughline is, admittedly, loose. “Unicorn” is meant to illustrate the concept of imagination, and each song is meant to embody the concept of imagination in some aspect or detail.⁴ And it isn’t terribly hard to find it in each song if you pause to consider the lyrics, though the impact differs: from the high fantasy/tabletop wordplay in “Empress of the Damned” to the very real, very heavy fantasy in closing track “Postcard from the American Dream”, the running theme is omnipresent, and is sometimes the source of the aforementioned dark undertones, as opposed to always being the ‘treatment’ for it, as we typically attribute to escapism.

This album is very good. There isn’t much to ping it for, except maybe that I need them to include Ronan Harris (VNV Nation) because his voice would do so much with this sound.⁵ I strongly recommend it to anybody who enjoys electronic or 80s music; I would also encourage anybody who enjoys pop, rock, or movie scores to give it a go. Metalheads could also find something good here, given the often intricate and intense instrumentation.

Rating: Blue Purple⁶

1. Intentionally phrased to make my wife raise an eyebrow, then read this footnote and roll her eyes.

2. If the album cover is anything to go by, “curious” is bright, neon pink”.

3. “DooM Dance“ is one example, which makes sense, as it features French Darksynth artist Carpenter Brut.

4. Closing track “Postcard from the American Dream” already hurts quite a lot without this context.

5. Strange phrasing intentional. Is it sexual? Up to you. Go listen to this man’s voice and then come back and think on that.

6. EDIT 12/19/24: Over a year later, I’m coming back to retroactively adjust this score because I keep coming back to this album, and I scored it wrong. It doesn’t change its end-of-year ranking, but this is definitely at least a 9.5, and I was hesitant to commit to that last year.