Cold Beat

The project of Hannah Lew, Cold Beat combines stark instrumentation that straddles coldwave and post-punk with deeply felt songwriting. From the beginning, Lew dove into big-picture topics: On 2014's Over Me, the singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist explored the death of her father and loss in general on compact, driving songs that harked back to the heyday of Tubeway Army, Blondie, and the Sound (whose song "Cold Beat" gave Lew's project its name). The changing face of her hometown of San Francisco in the wake of the tech boom informed 2015's Into the Air, which added jangly indie pop, motorik, and minimal synth experiments to Lew's repertoire. Later, the electronic elements of Cold Beat's music came to the forefront on 2020's polished, expansive Mother, which reflected the influence of Eurythmics (as well as Lew's motherhood), and on the following year's introspective War Garden.