Delectable synth-pop romance from Montreal’s Library L’Amour – manna for the Cosey, From Nursery To Misery, Oï les Ox or Teresa Winter fanclubs.

Jointly highlighted by Ziggy’s Stroom and Victor De Roo’s cherry picking Kontakt Group, the duo of Yasmine Ixe and Richard Ryan Wener, aka Library L’Amour, specialise in a form of dreamlike synth-pop elegance weft from smudged pads and utterly gorgeous vocals that drift between harmonic haze, erotic whisper and opiated sensuality across ‘Premier Caprice’. It’s immaculate stuff and one of the strongest debuts of 2023 already.

Richard Ryan Wegner is perhaps better known as RW, co-founder of club music label Temple beside Ex-Terrestrial and M Salaciak, and Yasmine Ixe hails from a loosely related scene of synth-pop and electronica in Montreal, previously recording on Bella Union with The Beat Escape. In duo, they sound ready made for Stroom with an inch-perfect, vintage sound that also benefits from the subtly contemporary feel of records on Victor De Roo’s label.

Bookended by dream-weft synths and chiffon vox in ‘Limonade’ and the pitching loops of ‘Sous-entendu’, the EP’s biggest treats lurk in the CTI-like slink and orientalist allure of ‘Premier Caprice’ and the snake-hipped chanson ditty ‘De délites en délires’, which we can practically guarantee will be stuck in your heads for days, weeks, months after ingestion.