PonyHomie’s “Lost” is a four-on-the-floor, kick drum dance party, complete with frantically climbing, arpeggiated synthesizers, drum machine handclaps, and warbling, vocoder-like vocals. This darkly subdued take on new wave calls to mind bands like Survive (of Stranger Things fame) and The Faint. It’s a fuzzy nostalgia for a sound that never actually existed, and the false memory serves PonyHomie well.
While nods to the ’80s abound on “Lost,” what sets PonyHomie apart is the aforementioned vocal effects, which call to mind some demon version of autotuning and add a 21st-century wrinkle to the new wave stylings of the song. Cher’s autotune this is not. The particular genius of this move is that vocalist Brandon Feist’s impassioned vocals – he seems to be atoning for something here – read as chillingly cold.
Throughout “Lost” there is an icy feeling. You feel it in its plodding intro, its climax of cascading synthesizers, and its somber outro. The song operates under a strange calculus, one where the closer you get to a feeling – whether it be the root of the singers’ conflict or the melodic hook of the song – the further away you feel.
We used to play a game as kids where someone would pick an object in a room, and you’d have to guess what they picked. I guess we weren’t very creative. But the interesting part was, every time you got further away from the object, you’d be told you were “colder.” To be a spectator to this game, with no context, would be a chilling sight. One child points at a bookshelf. Another simply says, “colder.” Over and over. This is “Lost” in a nutshell – the listener dons headphones and immediately transports themselves to a nostalgic amalgamation of haircuts and shopping malls and Prom dates, all the while PonyHomie says, “colder.”