Alan Palomo on his new album ‘World of Hassle’ and his love for synthesizers

Alan Palomo is in his element at L.A.’s Vintage Synthesizer Museum.

Christopher Intagliata/NPR

Alan Palomo won’t reveal what synthesizer he relied on for much of his new album, World of Hassle, except to say it’s a Casio he bought for $500. He’s afraid mentioning the model might popularize it and make it shoot up in price, as has already happened for so many of these treasured machines from the 1970s and ’80s.

“Boomers had their Harleys and millennials have their ’80s nostalgia,” he says. Palomo, who is himself a millennial, shares this passion – and he reminisces about the 1981 Roland Jupiter-8 he used to own, which he calls the “holy grail” of synthesizers. “Like an idiot, I sold it,” he says. “I tried to buy one again during the pandemic. They shot up to, like, $37,000.”

For much of his career, Palomo has used machines like the Jupiter-8 to craft dance floor pop music, primarily as frontman for the group Neon Indian, which became a standard-bearer of the chillwave genre with songs like the 2009 hit “Deadbeat Summer.”

On the day we meet, he’s in full ’80s nostalgia mode, because we’re strolling through L.A.’s Vintage Synthesizer Museum. Palomo points out one of the elusive Jupiter-8s – it’s easy to miss among the dozens of Moogs, Korgs and Oberheims, stacked floor to ceiling amid racks of effects, oozing with cables. The visual is that of an old telephone operating system, crossed with a 1970s mainframe computer.

“Aesthetically, they’re beautiful,” Palomo says. “There’s a lot of incredible design that went into them in the era. And they’re meant to be intimidating, but also kind of inviting.”

Palomo looks more…