Even after all this time
I still put you above the rest
Yours is the silence
That’s deadliest
Some loves end cleanly; others keep a key to the room long after the door has slammed. Silence can become its own kind of conversation, filled with imagined replies, remembered jokes, and the stubborn belief that one day the phone might light up with a name you never stopped wanting to see. Moving on sounds simple until the past still feels unfinished. Hope survives on little: a song, a street, a photograph, the sense that timing once failed where feeling did not. We cling because possibility is easier to carry than finality, and because love rarely leaves when communication does.
Romantic failure has always needed good transportation. Trains leave, elevators close, taxis disappear down avenues, and somewhere across town the person you still love is living an entire evening without knowing you are composing speeches to them in your head. New York City’s Bunny X (Abbi Gordin and Jenny Bates) understand this beautifully on the effervescent Even If We Don’t Talk, a sweetly obsessive slice of synth-driven pop from the New York duo’s third album, Love On A High Floor.
The album places Gordon and Bates amid the glass-and-steel ambitions of 1980s Manhattan, where money climbed toward the clouds while romance remained vulnerable to busy signals, missed trains, bad timing, and plain cowardice. Here, the emotional problem is brutally familiar: communication has stopped, yet hope keeps finding loopholes.
“This track was a latecomer in the writing process and almost didn’t make the final cut at all since album production was in the final stages by the time the idea for the song came about,” says Gordon. “Even If We Don’t Talk explores the lingering inability to move on from a past love and the hope that something might still happen.”
That unresolved ache gets dressed for Friday night. A driving synthwave-meets-Italo Disco beat gives the song forward motion while Gordon and Bates sing with an earnestness recalling Madonna. Whitney Houston, Sheila E. and Sheena Easton, when pop could make romantic disaster feel perfectly reasonable beneath fluorescent lights. Their voices eventually tumble into a call-and-response outro that practically begs for roller skates, polished floors, and one more lap before somebody turns the lights on.
Director Alice Teeple, with Bates helming the visual effects, carries that sensibility into a video partly filmed around New York’s Financial District, transforming crossed paths into romantic slapstick with a corporate-era sheen.
“We wanted to make this look as authentically from the 80s as possible,” says Teeple. “I am a big fan of shows like Moonlighting and movies like 9-5, so I jumped at the chance to try my hand at that with Abbi and Jenny. I borrowed some ideas from The Twilight Zone and the Boomtown Rats video for Banana Republic, they brought a great Working Girl aesthetic to their style. I loved the idea of missed connections due to transit troubles, crossed wires, and rotten timing. In the end it all works out, though! We all need a lighthearted distraction from the troubles of our world right now, and we created a delightful little vignette together.”
Perhaps that happy ending explains the song’s charm. Anyone can declare a romance finished; the dangerous part is secretly leaving the porch light on. Even If We Don’t Talk lives in that unreasonable interval, where silence still contains possibility and every missed connection carries the ridiculous promise of another chance.
Watch below:
New York City retrowave duo Bunny X released their third full-length album, Love on a High Floor, on August 14th via Aztec Records. The record is available digitally and through Bandcamp, with vinyl and CD editions offered through ElasticStage.
Framed by the wealth, ambition, and vertiginous excess of 1980s Wall Street, Love on a High Floor places Bunny X high above Manhattan, where polished offices and skyline views conceal the compromises accumulating beneath the surface. The setting becomes an apt backdrop for songs concerned with adulthood, romantic expectation, and the uneasy distance between the life one imagines and the life that eventually takes shape.
The album also revisits ideas introduced on Bunny X’s debut, Young & In Love, effectively catching up with its characters years later. Teenage innocence has given way to careers, complicated relationships, and the realization that youthful ambitions rarely survive adulthood unchanged. Across Love on a High Floor, Bunny X examine that reckoning alongside the seductive promise of the American Dream, tracing how aspiration can gradually become disenchantment once success, love, and security prove harder to define than they first appeared.
Love On A High Floor is available here and here.
Listen to Even If We Don’t Talk below and order the album here.
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