Alexis Taylor & Mike Simonetti — ‘Perfect Kiss’

It feels like a compact chapter in Alexis Taylor’s slow-motion solo arc. A few months after Paris In The Spring landed—a record built around other people’s voices and odd pairings—Taylor has teamed with Mike Simonetti for a 12″ single that quietly does the work most press releases try to shout about. I’m still not over the AI videos that accompanied Taylor’s last rollout, but the music itself is what sticks: warm, slightly melancholic, and clever about where it borrows from the past.

The new single arrives under the names Alexis Taylor and Mike Simonetti. It comes with a cover of Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “I See A Darkness” and remixes by claire rousay and Black Forces. The original is titled Perfect Kiss — not to be confused with New Order’s “The Perfect Kiss” — though you can hear that 80s post-punk-gloss running through its veins. It’s also, bluntly, a really good song.

On first listen Taylor opens quietly: a small, vulnerable voice over an acoustic guitar that feels like a doorway. The arrangement doesn’t stay small. Simonetti folds in drum-machine propulsion and synth washes until the center gives way to a kind of ecstatic pop rupture—a dancefloor moment that arrives as if by surprise. It’s the sort of composition that hides a darker lyric under a singable hook, the exact trick Simonetti says they were aiming for.

The two met in a very Brooklyn moment: Taylor heard Simonetti DJ at Output, the Williamsburg room that now exists only in memory. “I was really excited about the re-edits he was playing that night,” Taylor said, and that enthusiasm became the seed for the sessions that followed. Simonetti is a familiar figure to anyone who follows the Italians Do It Better imprint (and before that Troubleman Unlimited); his taste has always been a little reverent toward pop craft, and he leans into that here.

“I grew up listening to the radio on drives with my parents, whether it was driving around Bayonne, New Jersey or a trip to the Jersey shore. I was raised on pop music and on the radio. Before even making music with Alexis, we would have little conversations and seem to be on a similar wavelength regarding pop music. He’s kinda around the same age as me, which doesn’t hurt, either. I think you have to be a certain age to appreciate ’80s pop music because it does not exist as we know it today. So the songs that me and Alexis make are definitely going to have a lot of pop elements to them, even though the subject matter might not be stereotypical pop. But that’s the beauty of a good song — hiding darkness behind a pop hook.”

They turned that sensibility into a video shot on Super 8 by director Brian Deran. The footage looks exactly as advertised: grain and warmth, sun-bleached LA exteriors cut against close, handheld interiors. Taylor, Simonetti, and Elizabeth Wight (Simonetti’s Pale Blue partner) appear as low-key cameos and collaborators; there’s nothing slick about it, which suits the music’s two moods—intimacy and sudden exuberance. The film grain makes faces feel like film negatives of memory—more honest for their scratches.

What matters here is how this small release sits in each artist’s career. For Taylor, it’s another notch off the Hot Chip mantel where his solo work wanders between folk tenderness and club logic. For Simonetti, it’s another example of his ability to translate jukebox instincts into something contemporary: he’s always worked on the border between nostalgia and immediacy, whether through remixes, DJ sets, or label runs. As a 12″, the package is tidy: the Bonnie “Prince” Billy cover leans into the record’s shadowier side, while the remixes stretch the original toward other rooms.

The single (“I See A Darkness” b/w “Perfect Kiss”) is out 6/12 on Smugglers Way. It’s not a reinvention, and it doesn’t have to be. In an era that keeps trying to invent new forms of immediacy, this is a reminder that thoughtful pop construction and a well-placed dusting of 80s influence still carve out a useful, stubborn space.