A little disclaimer going into this: forget CHVRCHES. Forget Lorde. Forget Haim or whatever half-baked "retro" 80's synth-pop acts topped your list this year. They all suck compared to the uncanny brilliance illustrated by St. Lucia's magnificent debut When The Night, sax and all. I mean, seriously dudes...go ahead, try to find a better indie-pop album this year, cause it ain't The 1975 or whatever Pitchfork-endorsed poseurs pass for pop sensationalists in this corner o' the century.

Honestly, I've heard my fair share of indie-pop and "chillwave" and everything in between over what feels like a decade or more at this point. For every decent album with actual hooks and some nuance there's 50 more records of disposable garbage without any real personality or staying power. So you can imagine how surprised I was when the single best indie-anything album I've heard since Wincing The Night Away back in 2007 happens to get recommended to me out of the blue by a band I was already following.

What struck me like a thunderbolt was this act's strange yet entrancing tropical vibe, an atmosphere conjured from some nether realm between The Flaming Lips, Wild Nothing and Lionel Ritchie. I spun the album's lead single 'Elevate' over and over again for the following 24 hours like my life depended on it: I subsequently learned that the damn thing is auditory crack-cocaine with gated drums.

Flash forward a month or so later, and I get to hear the whole record. Lo' and behold, I learn that the rest of the album is just as good yet nothing like it in some respects...and that's just more to this debut record's credit methinks: it changes things up enough from song to song to keep you invested, yet it never sheds its festive mood. A real record with a raison d'etre to match, conceived and produced from the ground up by the sort of trendy Brooklyn act that wouldn't survive 5 seconds in a mosh pit...who woulda ever thunk it.

Vocalist and band mastermind Jean-Philip Grobler is a strange creature: his voice isn't particularly strong or unique on its own, but his songcrafting prowess rivals some of the best pop acts of the 80's. For example, a tune like 'Closer Than This' starts off with synthesizer line straight out of a Survivor album before morphing into a lilting, call-and-response slice of pop nirvana...and the song isn't even half over yet by this point!

But enough rambling: I can't think of a more crowded musical arena outside of metal in 2013 than the mainstream oriented, ADD-riddled landscape of pop music, but if there was some kind of race to see who could put together the end-all to end-all of "nu-80's" pop albums before Xmas came and went, I'd say St. Lucia is the clear winner by a landslide of sunshine, coconuts and tiki dancers.