U.K. artists Jeremy Warmsley and Elizabeth Sankey started making music together as Summer Camp in October of 2009, and their sunny wash of mellow C-86 pop was a timely fit with the lo-fi synth pop craze (coined "chillwave") that was sweeping the States. With their identity concealed, the two posted a short series of videos that went viral due to their clever usage of gauzy old movie footage: "Ghost Train" rearranged the tame scenes from the 1969 X-rated film Last Summer, and "Round the Moon" borrowed clips from the '70s romantic teen drama A Swedish Love Story. Teen heartache in movies became an ongoing theme for Warmsley and Sankey, and as well as the aforementioned songs, Summer Camp's debut EP included songs about "Veronica Sawyer" (Winona Ryder's character in Heathers) and "Jake Ryan" (the boy-crush of Molly Ringwald's character in Sixteen Candles). Moshi Moshi released the Young EP in November of 2010. The duo recorded their second album with Pulp's Steve Mackey co-producing, and Welcome to Condale was released in late October of 2011 by Apricot and Moshi Moshi. The following year, the band toured behind the album in the U.K., released an EP (Always) in July, and spent the rest of the year writing songs for their third album. With production by Stephen Street (the Smiths, Blur), 2013's Summer Camp was the duo's most accomplished-sounding record to date. In what must have seemed like a dream come true for them, the duo's next project was providing the soundtrack to Charlie Lyne's Beyond Clueless, a documentary delving into the teen movies of the '90s. The experience was rewarding and found them expanding their musical template to include some '90s indie rock sounds. It also gave them the confidence to self-produce their albums, which they did on 2015's Bad Love. In 2020, they returned with the full-length Romantic Comedy, which also served as the soundtrack to Sankey's feature documentary film debut. ~ Jason Lymangrover, Rovi

Ugly Duckling, Summer Camp

Ugly Duckling

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