Strap on your platform shoes, dust off your leg warmers and give your favorite Duran Duran record a spin. Tegan and Sara’s candy-coated newest album “Heartthrob” is a time machine vacation to the 1980s packed into 10 immaculately produced pop tunes, 1.21 gigawatts be damned.

The Quin sisters call back to a decade where songs were smothered in synthesizers, girl power was all the rage and Lauper wasn’t a blue-haired granny croaking out “True Colors” at the One World Concert.

But “Heartthrob” is every bit as immediate as it is nostalgic: the carefully layered synths in “Closer” aren’t the bleep-blooping dubstep beats favored by the Top 40 crowd, but don’t sound outdated either. Tegan and Sara pluck influences from the 80s pop charts, polish them and unleash them as insanely catchy synth-pop jams that fit in the current pop music landscape.

If not for Justin Timberlake’s unforeseen return to his pop music throne, “Closer” would easily have snagged the title for best pop song of early 2013. It’s a flirty single that mixes chirpy synthesizers and soaring choruses, letting the Quins play off of each other’s harmonies. It’s soaked in blissful naivety and puppy love, and it’s as charming as it is catchy. Keen-eyed remix artists (Passion Pit, please stand up) will make a meal of this one.

Most of “Heartthrob” doesn’t sound like a pair of 30-somethings is at the wheel. “Goodbye, Goodbye” desperately wants to be a tear-jerking breakup anthem, but that emotional weight gets swept away in bouncy synthesizers and a chorus packed with hooks.

“I Was a Fool” stays in the same vein — instead of penning a moping, sad sack indie tune, Tegan and Sara stuff their pangs for lost love into a humongous toe-tapper of a power ballad.

And yet for all of its hopeless romanticism, “Heartthrob” is mostly just an album about the pangs of young love getting ripped apart at the seams: the highs, the lows and the fallout. It’s easily smarter than the average pop album, with the sneering “How Come You Don’t Want Me” keeping its mid-tempo tongue firmly in cheek. From its title to its blustery instrumental arrangement, “Now I’m All Messed Up” follows suit, ratcheting teen drama to fiery degrees.

Even with all of the melodramatic lyricism and fervent shouts for lovers to stay, it’s always clear that Tegan and Sara are totally in on their own joke — they don’t hem and haw when it comes to singing about love going belly up.

The duo is direct and in your face, but they sound like they’re having fun with every second of it. For all of its veiled self-loathing, “I Couldn’t Be Your Friend” could’ve been penned by British musical duo Wham!, just like “Drove Me Wild” owes a lot of its sound to Scandal’s 1984 classic, “The Warrior.”

Dancing to lyrics that sound like they got torn from the pages of the Quin sisters’ diaries doesn’t feel wrong. If anything, the open-book lyricism the duo favors adds fuel to an already energetic album.

That’s not to say “Heartthrob” is a flawless, confectionary slice of pure pop perfection. While most of the album’s best hooks sound organic and natural, some pander to mainstream audiences. “Guilty As Charged” makes the duo sing-talk their way through a slogging four minutes of dreary drumbeats, and Tegan and Sara have never sounded flatter than on “Shock To Your System.” But its blemishes, clunky as they are, make the album all the more endearing.

What you see is exactly what you get with Tegan and Sara. “Heartthrob” is an obscenely catchy pop album that dissects the best and worst of romances – nothing more, nothing less.

Take it at face value and you might just find yourself dancing along to one of the best pop records 2013 has conjured up.

Published on February 4, 2013 at 11:05 pm

Contact Erik: [email protected] | @therealvandyman