Romance & Dean Hurley - In Every Dream Home A Heartache (2022)

Romance and Dean Hurley combine for ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’, an album-length celebration of the curdled glamour and heart rending melodrama of US daytime soap operas. Entirely sampled from VHS dubbed broadcasts bit-crunched by early YouTube codecs, plaintive claims of love and desperate accusations of betrayal reside against lossy drenched grand pianos and mirage-like synth pads under a canopied sonic gauze of low fidelity.

Perhaps the longest-running, most disposable scripted genre in television history, the daytime serial lent itself to a particular brand of concentrated, hyper-melodramatic examinations of moral conflicts, secret relationships, adultery, and familial turmoil amidst the mundane landscape of the domestic interior. A truly under-examined format that wove drama and intrigue amidst a continuous, open narrative, Soap Operas were designed and crafted specifically to addict and sustain their daytime audiences with escapist storylines that perpetually cascaded drama into drama.

By now a hallmark of the mystery-laden Romance project, high-drama and sentimentality are extracted and suspended into an emotionally earnest, soft-focused aerosol state. Together, Romance and Hurley’s cri de coeur collage furthers the branded sonic recipe into ephemeral narrative territory, resulting in a truly spellbinding and unique record of misted courtly nostalgia aligned with existential dread and epochal themes of superlative love, life and death.