I’ve always found something so appealing about the eyelinered clerk behind the counter of a record store in one of those nostalgia-driven, circa John Hughes, coming-of-age films. So often, such characters appear only briefly, but they always have so much depth. It’s as if they’re fulfilling a stereotype just to prove that there’s always more than meets the eye. There’s nothing quirky about them. They work at a record store because they want to be with all their friends. You will only find them, truly, where the needle meets the groove. These characters come to life when you see how live and breathe the opening chords of track one.

I see myself as this archetype as I lean in for Gauntlet Hair‘s latest LP’s opener, “Human Nature.” That camera just pans with that percussion. The build just surges through you, like the intro to “Enola Gay.” You know that electric build that flashes through Molly Ringwald’s feet in the library. He repeats, “They tell me I make you smile one time a week,” and it takes everything in me to keep from moving John Cryer style around Empire Records. Such a powerful opener leaves the rest of the record to simmer, foil, and build again, perpetually evolving.

“Bad Apple,” the second single released off this record, allows the narrative to ease up. A slow burner, this track is overcranking through the first half of the album. It demands a listener’s attention. It’s sexy and smoldering, like watching someone with your heart in their hands walk around a room. You lock eyes with someone who’s no good for you, and you don’t give a damn.

“Obey Me” serves as a little still, a short breath, before spiraling into the tinny tempo upper, “Heave.” It’s a slamming rock jam, dripping with 1980′s aesthetic. “Falling Out” bleeds in a similar way, like an early Duran Duran track. It’s equal parts tender and harsh. Stealthily slipped between the two songs is “G.I.D.” Internally and externally, the narrator battles with the “stress of a G.I.D. complex.” “You are the one I want,” he sings, “I don’t care.” In a current album heaving a new wave disposition, the subject of sexuality and gender spectrum is an interesting match. While drawing from such androgynous roots, it molds perfectly to a discussion of identity.

With the close of the album, I continue to feel wrapped inside an oversized sweater, plodding around Championship Vinyl. If it were up to me, I’d always be here, and I’d always be that girl. Listening to this record is less like time traveling in the nostalgic sense, but rather creates a moment suspended in the balance of our culture. There are movements in music and art that are closely tied to movements in social and personal revelation. The 1980′s, and the artistic mediums that flourished during the decade, were filled with self-revelation. Music and film became how young people identify themselves, be it New Wave or Hair Metal. When an artist draws from similar movements in a song, like Gauntlet Hair does with the tracks on Stills, it provides for an additional dimension for the song to exist in. The band presents highly personal songs that cut deep. I close my eyes and move. There’s the old familiar smell of worn cardboard sleeves and hours-old coffee. It’s like rediscovering a place I found in somewhere in celluloid.

Stills is out now via Dead Oceans.