You’ve had this one for years, and you’ve never quite given it the attention it deserved.
The Age of Reason arrived in 1996 to a world that had largely stopped listening for Bronski Beat. Jimmy Somerville had long since departed. Steve Bronski and Larry Steinbachek — the two who actually built the synthesizers, who actually wrote the chord structures — had cycled through vocalists and watched the music press move on. By the mid-nineties, Hi-NRG was either nostalgia or embarrassment, depending on who you asked. This record landed quietly. It may have landed in a charity shop before it landed in your hands.
That’s fine. Some albums work better without the noise.
What Changed When They Lost Jimmy
The absence of Somerville’s stratospheric falsetto forced Bronski and Steinbachek to think differently about melodic space. Adrian Hinton came in as vocalist, and he’s lower, moodier, more interior — a voice that sits inside the synthesizers instead of climbing over them. It took me several listens before I stopped hearing what wasn’t there and started hearing what was.
The production is lean and deliberate. The duo recorded largely at their own setup, a working method they’d developed since the first album — Bronski was always more interested in the machinery than the celebrity. The arrangements here have a mid-decade electronic texture, yes, but underneath that there’s real structural rigor. The basslines are doing argumentative, specific things. The synth pads change character depending on what’s harmonically happening around them. None of this is accidental.
The Tracks That Reward You
“I’m Gonna Run Away” is probably why you bought this. It’s the obvious one. But spend time with “Why,” which is quieter and stranger, a track that keeps threatening a chorus and then refusing to deliver it on schedule. That withholding is intentional. These were men who understood the dancefloor intimately, which meant they also understood how to deny it.
“One More Chance” opens with a synth motif that sounds almost skeletal until the low end arrives, and then suddenly it sounds inevitable. Steinbachek’s keyboard work here is the thing I missed on every casual listen — the way he voices chords is not what you’d expect from a group still being filed under Hi-NRG. There’s jazz influence in there, a deliberate flatness in certain intervals that gives the track a kind of tired dignity.
Bronski Beat spent their whole career in the shadow of their own debut, which contained one of the most recognizable opening seconds in British pop. That single — “Smalltown Boy” — created a kind of permanent context that everything else had to exist inside. By 1996, they’d been carrying that context for twelve years. What’s remarkable about The Age of Reason is that it doesn’t sound burdened. It sounds like two men who have made peace with what they are.
Larry Steinbachek died in 2016, of cancer. He was 56. Steve Bronski has largely stepped away from the public eye.
Put this on tonight in a quiet room with something decent between you and the signal. Let Hinton’s voice settle. Stop waiting for the falsetto. The album has been waiting for you to do this for a long time, and it’s more patient than you’ve been.