Do you remember the good old days
Before the ghost town?
We danced and sang and the music played
In a de boomtown
In the twilight of industrial Britain, The Specials released Ghost Town, a lament chillingly prophetic. Conceived by Jerry Dammers amid the boarded-up shopfronts and shuttered factories of early 1980s Coventry, it charted the nation’s descent into unrest and unemployment under Margaret Thatcher’s austere reign. Its mournful horns and echoing rhythms captured the eerie stillness of once-vibrant cities, where music had died and discontent festered. When riots soon ignited across the land, Ghost Town stood less as pop song than requiem; a dub elegy for a country adrift, and one of Britain’s most haunting works of social observation.
There’s a chill in the circuitry of WANTS’ reimagining of Ghost Town that hums with fatal beauty. Where the 1981 original wandered the ruins of Thatcher’s Britain, the Calgary-based band drives through a sleeker apocalypse in modern-day Canada. The dub heartbeat is gone; in its place, a chaotic pulse of synth, relentless and unblinking. Every beat feels measured against absence, every melody a reflection in the broken mirror of the past.
The production is clean yet claustrophobic, the air tight with tension. Synths loop like cold machinery grinding through memory, while the bassline sways with a restrained menace, too composed to explode. The voice, rich, trembling, human, becomes the bridge between eras, carrying Dammers’ ghostly lament into a digital afterlife. WANTS exhumes the feeling behind the original song, translating urban desolation into something that moves the body while freezing the blood.
Director Winona Julian’s video deepens the unease: a fever dream of phosphorescent light and forgotten corridors. Neon hues spill across stone ruins, where phantoms wander like relics from another decade’s despair. The color palette burns strange and artificial, a theatre of the unreal…the kind that feels too vivid to dismiss as fantasy. The visual language suggests both decay and resurrection: a spectral rave for the living and the lost.
The song strides forward with purpose, every element balanced like architecture under pressure; the synths scaffolded against silence, the drums echoing in the hollow of history. It’s dance music built for ruins, ceremonial in its pulse and unflinching in its mood.
Watch the video for “Ghost Town” below:
As the first glimpse of their debut In Plain Sight (due November 14), Ghost Town feels like a declaration from a band aware of the lineage they inhabit: post-punk’s tension, darkwave’s precision, and a fascination with the fragile structures that hold a civilization together. There’s a sense that WANTS have studied collapse not as spectacle but as inheritance, building from its debris something both mournful and strangely magnetic.
Listen to Ghost Town below and order the single here.
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