Blueprint Tokyo Finds Hope In Neon Circuits

Whatever you expected to come out of Oklahoma City in 2025, Blueprint Tokyo probably isn’t it. And that’s a good thing. Their new album, Neon Circuits and the Mission of Hope, is a 16-song, 51-minute exposition of the push and pull between desperate longing and dogged optimism as they marry the stridence of emo to the unflagging cheerfulness of 1980s synth-pop. The marriage adds weight to the latter and forestalls the gloomy petulance of the former while perfectly describing the lyrical tension.

Many of the songs have a ragged undercurrent beneath plaintive melodies and often strident vocal performances that speak to a clear line of descent from bands in the ‘00s like White Lies or The Killers. The second song, “Replicants,” and “Transfer,” which comes up near the end, are guitar-driven dance numbers that call back the loudest to that era. But just as “Replicants” teases with its roller-skating-rink chorus, “These are the hearts and nights of 1984,” the long dark interior of the album reaches back to that glittering decade with something approaching reverence. Thin guitar sounds juxtaposed with pristinely controlled distortion, the sudden appearance of the lone saxophone, and, of course, those swirling, sparkling synth sounds all show up here but manage to not be cloying or “faithful” reproductions. In this regard, Neon Circuits’ production values work wonders. The thin, brittle soundscape that permeated everything in the ‘80s is replaced by a luxurious timbre that gives the album a deep cushion to rest on.

The songs here are surprisingly dense and resistant to a surface listen. Partly because there are (literally) 16 songs on this album, it takes a few passes to really sink into them. But another big reason is that many of these songs don’t convey the typical verse/chorus/verse structure. If anything, the structures of the songs hang on the urgency of the words, shifting through different settings and melodies that respond dynamically to spoken-word segments, singable hooks, and especially the mantra-like declarations. In “Taking My Breath,” which has a killer sax solo, Kevin Dawson sings, “Hearts will be broken until they find their way.” “Stoke that fire where your dreams are alive” opens “A Whole New Life,” along with the sparkling synths. “Mission control, I know we need hope” is the calm center piece of “Mission Control,” while in “Infused,” which lands about three songs from the end, Dawson gets increasingly frantic as he shouts, “I believe that we can all be something more than what we are right now!”

Every cynical bone in my body wants to reject this stuff out of hand. But it’s hard to do that in the face of their defiant optimism, which is a perfect and persuasive fit for the sound they’ve created. Maybe it’s the nostalgia fundamental to their music that makes it work. Or maybe it’s their homage to our present gloomy zeitgeist that keeps it authentic. Whatever the case, the strange title Neon Circuits and the Mission of Hope ends up being literal as each roughly three-minute messenger from the decade of neon passes through the raw filter of emo and connects with the others to form a kind of pop music gospel.

The themes of emotional dislocation and the need for some form of redemption bleed together from song to song, giving the album the feel of a narrative cued from the line, “scary movies scaring people” in the opening song, “Say Anything.” In its non-linear way, this narrative touches down on moments of fear and resolution throughout the album. “Dragons,” which arrives just past the middle mark, exemplifies this with “something coming for us in the dark” that can be soothed by a song that helps both the individual and the world. Other songs pass the theme along from one to the next. The piano-driven “Stranger Things,” with its descending chords echoed in one section by a gorgeous two-part harmony, pleads in breathless spoken words for salvation from “all of these sins and all the ways that I can’t win.” Then “Stand And Deliver” picks up the theme in similar but ballad-like terms with the imperatives, “Stand and deliver me.”

Blueprint Tokyo has created a smart album in Neon Circuits and the Mission of Hope that grows closer to you with each successive listen. Through the emotional twists and turns, they manage to reference everything from 80s cinema to The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot while never letting go of their intricately crafted pop/rock sound and heart-on-the-sleeve ethic that keep you invested.

Reviewed by Christopher Raley