We Be Echo's 1983 'Sexuality' Is the Synthwave Blueprint Nobody Talks About
We Be Echo's 1983 Belgian synth track 'Sexuality' resurfaces in synthwave circles — and it sounds less like nostalgia than a blueprint.
Before the neon grids and retrowave playlists, before Kavinsky or Com Truise ever touched a synthesizer, there were acts like We Be Echo — a Belgian duo carving out sounds in 1983 that felt like transmissions from a future that never quite arrived. Their track Sexuality, released that year, has been quietly circulating in synthwave communities, and for good reason: it sounds less like an artifact and more like a reference point.
The Sound That Time Forgot
There's a particular texture to early-80s European synth music that no plugin fully replicates — a rawness in the oscillators, a stiffness in the drum machines that paradoxically makes everything feel more alive. Sexuality carries all of that. The sequenced bassline hits with a mechanical urgency, the vocals drift somewhere between post-punk coldness and genuine longing, and the production sits in that narrow window of 1982–1984 when synthesizers were still slightly dangerous objects, not yet domesticated by the pop machine.
We Be Echo operated out of Belgium at a moment when that country was quietly one of the most interesting places in electronic music. The same soil that would eventually produce the new beat movement of the late 80s was already fermenting something in 1983, and tracks like Sexuality were part of that fermentation.
Why Synthwave Communities Keep Returning to 1983
The r/synthwave community sharing this track in 2026 isn't accidental. The synthwave revival — which peaked commercially around 2017–2019 and then underwent a genuine artistic maturation post-COVID — has been doing something increasingly interesting: looking past its own aesthetic signifiers toward the actual source material. Not just the blockbuster soundtracks and the obvious Tangerine Dream references, but the deeper cuts. The obscure Belgian new wave act. The forgotten Italo disco session musician. The proto-synth track that got three plays on a regional radio station in 1983 and then vanished.
COVID changed the archaeology of music fandom. With live events gone for two years, listeners went deep. Really deep. And what they found — in crates, in YouTube rabbit holes, in forgotten Discogs listings — was that the 1980s were far stranger and richer than the curated nostalgia version ever suggested.
The Italo-Belgian Connection
We Be Echo's sound sits at an intersection that deserves more attention: the meeting point between Belgian cold wave and the warmer melodicism of Italo synth. Sexuality doesn't belong cleanly to either camp, which is precisely what makes it interesting. It has the emotional reserve of Minimal Compact or early Tuxedomoon, but the harmonic instinct pushes toward something more immediately felt. That tension is the track's engine.
What This Means for the Revival Wave
Artists like Makeup and Vanity Set, Perturbator, and even the more recent wave of acts on labels like Italians Do It Better have been consciously working through this lineage. The BPM conversation in electronic music has come full circle — the hyper-speed trance of the early 2000s gave way to minimal house, which gave way to the mid-tempo synthwave boom, which is now accelerating again as artists chase the physicality of earlier decades.
Tracks like Sexuality matter in this context because they remind us that the energy was always there, underneath, waiting. The 120 BPM precision of a 1983 Roland drum machine and the 138 BPM euphoria of peak-era trance are more related than they appear — both reach for something transcendent through mechanical repetition.
Forty-three years after its release, We Be Echo's Sexuality is exactly the kind of track the current moment needs: proof that the impulse behind synthwave was never retro. It was always forward.
We Be Echo - Sexuality (1983)