Review
Genre and Mood
Postmodern Jukebox’s “Closer”, with Kenton Chen on lead vocals, is a cover that turns a 2016 electropop hit into a 1950s prom ballad: nostalgic and romantic by design, and playful in the way it asks you to hear a song you know through a decade it never belonged to.
Song Summary
The Chainsmokers’ original, with Halsey, is a future bass and electropop duet about a couple who broke up and meet again long after, and feel the old attraction return. Postmodern Jukebox keeps the words and the melody and changes everything around them. The video’s description calls it a “1950s Prom styled remake” and credits a small band: Scott Bradlee on piano and arrangement, Conrad Bauer on guitar, Ian Solomon on bass, Martin Diller on drums, and Mario Jose and Vince Cannady as backup singers behind Chen.
Musical Breakdown
The sources describe this arrangement through its line-up rather than bar by bar, so this walk-through stays with what they name.
The Lead Voice
Chen sings the lead alone. In the original, Andrew Taggart and Halsey take turns before singing the chorus together; here the conversation of two voices becomes one singer’s confession.
The Backing Singers
Two backup vocalists stand behind him, the classic shape of a 1950s vocal group, where a lead is framed by voices that support and answer him.
The Band
Where the original rests on programmed production and a retro-style synthesizer in the chorus, this version is played by piano, guitar, bass and drums, Bradlee’s usual way of placing a modern hit in a vintage room.
Concepts in Focus
This is a cover version of the kind Postmodern Jukebox has made its trade: not a faithful copy but a transfer of a song into another era’s style. Keeping the lyric while changing the setting lets you hear how much of a song’s feeling comes from its production. Compare Nouvelle Vague – Too Drunk to Fuck, which does the same with punk and bossa nova.
The backing singers bring vocal harmony, the stacked voices of the 1950s ballad, into a song first built around a synthesizer hook.
The music video is the work’s first form: the collective releases a new video on YouTube each week and only later gathers the songs on albums such as 33 Resolutions Per Minute.
Artistic Context
Postmodern Jukebox is a rotating collective founded in 2011 by the New York pianist Scott Bradlee, known for reworking modern pop into vintage styles, from swing to doo-wop. According to the video’s description, this was Kenton Chen’s solo debut in a PMJ video, after he had sung in the group’s cover of “MMMBop”. The recording opens 33 Resolutions Per Minute, released in January 2017.
Impact and Reception
The Chainsmokers’ “Closer” spent twelve weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, which gave this cover a song almost every viewer already knew. PMJ released the video “by popular demand”, and its staging, a prom night of the 1950s, does the rest. Watch it, then play the original, and listen to how differently the same words land.
