After EP / After EP 2

If you’re among the many who discovered L.A. pop duo After on social media in the last few months, you probably did a double take when you noticed that their two self-titled EPs were released this very year. Vocalist Justine Dorsey and producer Graham Epstein—often pictured together looking exactly like Frou Frou’s Details photo shoot—are the closest thing we have to Y2K time travelers, but that’s not really a compliment. Their debut cashes in on culture’s nostalgic obsession with strictly faithful recreations of several radio-friendly subgenres of the early ’00s. Though the out-of-time aesthetics are impressive, After’s limp and unimaginative rehashes have little to offer beyond the novelty of hearing these styles done all over again.

Consider “300 dreams” and “Deep Diving,” the interchangeable breakbeat pop tracks that open each EP. Dorsey told Rolling Stone that “300 dreams” represents her attempt at a “Coldplay coded” song. Breakbeat-based Coldplay should be a fascinating concept, but After opt for the laziest possible execution. Dorsey sounds a bit like a femme Chris Martin as she sings faux-inspirational verses contrasted by a downer hook (“Oh, look at the state of me/I’m always falling down”). The chord progression sounds like it could have been lifted from “Clocks” or “Speed of Sound.” Breakbeats, Coldplay songs, and pop choruses are exactly as you remember them, each element as inert as a museum display. “Deep Diving” repeats the formula, except the lyrics evoke a CD skipping (“All the stones on the beach, and the shells on the beach, and the sand in your teeth”), and with no anthemic final chorus, it ends abruptly after the bridge.

Lackadaisical songwriting decisions like this fracture the nostalgic lull. EP 2’s “Where we are now” tries to tell a story of everyday longing similar to Frou Frou’s “Hear Me Out,” but exchanges the central metaphor of waiting on hold for something even more circular (“Wherever we’re walking/I’ll see you at the end somehow/That’s where we are now”). Unsurprisingly, Dorsey and Epstein hardly touch the emotion apparent in Imogen Heap and Guy Sigsworth’s performances. “Close your eyes,” the EP 2 closer, evokes Speak for Yourself’s yearning technoromantic ballads at five percent power, but while the drums and breathy vocals may be superficially similar, the brilliance of a song like “Just for Now”—the reason Heap can yell “shut up” and then softly whisper that she’s “on your side” in the next breath—is its emotional dynamism. Dorsey’s robotic ponderings just meander over Epstein’s zombified version of the ROMpler-based affective synthwork from the 2003 visual novel that inspired their band name.

After’s lifeless consistency gives little impression that time travel is any fun. EP 1’s “Obvious” is immaculate-sounding mall rock, but it lacks all the personality and snotty affect that makes an early-2000s classic like “Complicated” so great. Dorsey gives us nothing as entertaining as an Avril Lavigne hit or as heartfelt as a Michelle Branch ballad—she just sings. And when staccato string hits à la Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” bookend the chorus, it feels like a nostalgic formality rather than a worthy addition.

Truly great retro music isn’t made by time travelers but by artists whose interpretation of the past remains compelling and productive in the present. PC Music resurrected passé sound artifacts in order to simultaneously embrace and critique consumer culture with varying degrees of irony—a terrifying word to After—and someone like Danny L Harle has parlayed this experience into work on tracks like Caroline Polachek’s “Blood and Butter” and “Billions,” where unironic anachronisms artfully commune with contemporary aesthetics. After’s version of unironic anachronism is more like insultingly ignorant bliss. EP 2’s “Outbound”—a uniformly positive pick-me-up anthem that promises you’ll feel better after your friend “take(s) you to the movies, then take(s) you to the park”—fetishistically embraces the sounds of faux-optimism that left a prior generation of young people blindsided by late capitalism.

With no substance under its surface, After’s pitch-perfect Y2K imitation doesn’t amount to more than a viral trend. Perhaps the music’s nostalgic presentation puts you at ease, but its profound lack of purpose in the present can’t justify the effort to revive it. This is pop’s Crystal Pepsi—a gloriously ephemeral product of our memories that came back tasting like absolutely nothing.