Kevin Bronson on October 7th, 2015

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It’s not hard to see where Coast Modern is coming from with their debut single “Hollow Life,” if you know the backstory of collaborators Luke Atlas and Coleman Trapp. They separately knocked around L.A. for a couple of years as songwriters-for-hire, crafting and pitching pop confections for A-listers before an existential crisis led Trapp to depart his native city for Colorado. There, he worked a restaurant job and cleared his head. “I realized I didn’t desire the trappings of music industry success that drove me for years,” he says. “I actually started thinking I might never go back.” But he scratched out some acoustic guitar demos and sent them to Atlas, who added some production and eventually “told him to get his ass back to L.A.” Some long hours in the studio later, the duo have a batch of slick, playful synth-pop, informed, as the groove-heavy single says, by “racing towards a dream on the horizon.” Only it’s their own dream now, not somebody else’s. “After we stopped shooting at an invisible moving target and had no agenda,” Atlas says, “that’s when the sound came.”

||| Stream: “Hollow Life”