JOSH Rouse reflects on Love In The Modern Age on his new album.

"Every time I’ve made a record, I’ve tried to make it different from the last one," says the Nebraska-born songwriter. "I always become fascinated by a different style of music. But at the end of the day, no matter how eclectic I try to make it, it’s my voice and melodic sensibility that tie things together."

Redolent of his breakthrough 2003 album 1972 – the year when he was born – Rouse's latest work on the Yep Roc label again seeks to capture "the aesthetics of a specific moment in time".

This time he drew inspiration from the sound and production of early 1980s releases by The Blue Nile, The Style Council and Prefab Sprout, together with Roxy Music’s Avalon, from 1982, and Leonard Cohen’s seventh and eighth albums, 1984's Various Positions and 1988's I’m Your Man.

Non-ironic touches such as saxophones, hand claps, guitar reverb, backing vocals and keyboards even echo New Romantic tropes.

Rouse had first moved from Nebraska to Nashville, recording his debut album, Dressed Like Nebraska in 1998, and after making Home in 2000, 1972 in 2003 and Nashville in 2005, he relocated to Valencia, Spain, with his wife Paz. Subtitulo ensued in 2006 and on El Turista in 2010 he experimented with writing and singing songs in Spanish before making his "surreal, ex-pat, therapy record" as he called 2014's sublime The Embers Of Time.

Now Love In The Modern Age fuses 2018 with the Eighties in the ever-changing Rouse house of music. Tickets are available at £16 in person from The Crescent, off Blossom Street, and Earworm Records, in Powells Yard, Goodramgate, or Jumbo Records in Leeds; online at pleasepleaseyou.com or on the door from 7.30pm.