Most synthwave albums hold that geometry for five or six tracks before they start repeating themselves. It is a short-form genre: at twenty minutes it feels dense, at forty it feels stretched, at an hour it feels hollowed out. This is where MOMARZ arrives with THE THEORY, an album of sixteen tracks — and the very number is already a statement.

This is a rare instance of spatial cartography in synthwave — a genre that more commonly reproduces a mood. And judging by the toolkit — a Yamaha electronic piano P-125, an M-VAVE MIDI piano, a drum pad, a bundle of royalty-free samples — the artist works with a moderate, domestic set of hardware. The P-125 is a digital piano at the home-studio level; it has a characteristically warm key attack and a straightforward sound that, in the context of synthwave, becomes an anchor for more abstract synthetic textures. The M-VAVE is a small MIDI controller, another tool of a modest studio. In other words, THE THEORY was written on whatever the man had sitting on his desk. And it is precisely this domestic scale of production that makes the album’s cosmic ambitions touchingly convincing: the film was shot on an iPhone — and it worked.

Special attention should be paid to the opening track, “Party Moves“ — an instrumental piece with a driving introduction that operates at one specific point: an empty club before the crowd arrives. Instead of vocals, there is echo, transformed into an autonomous voice. This echo cools the track, adds distance, makes the dance rhythm slightly spectral. If you listen to “Party Moves” in the context of an album opener and set aside single-release logic, the authorial decision reads immediately: MOMARZ refuses to begin with a hit. He begins with a space.

Next comes “Keeping It Cool” — and here MOMARZ makes his first serious production move. Pulsating effects are woven into the synthwave fabric: a light stutter, a dissolution of the melodic line into percussive noise. The result is a characteristic “stuck tape” effect — a technique usually associated with lo-fi and vaporwave, but here it works in an entirely different context: modern production, clean sound, and then suddenly — deliberate distortion, a glitch. The effect is memorable, and it establishes one of the album’s internal narratives: the idea that dance exists on the boundary between pain and pleasure.

The title track, “The Theory,“ is the central statement. Here MOMARZ allows himself softening for the first time. After the driving introduction, a piano line enters — and this is precisely the moment where the Yamaha P-125 becomes audible as a separate instrument rather than part of the overall synthetic mass. The key attack, the piano runs — fingerwork that a click of the mouse in a DAW imitates poorly. The softening lasts a brief episode: the drive returns, the rhythm restores itself, the track heads for the finish line. But that interval, where synthwave passes itself through the piano, operates as a thesis. The genre knows how to take off its stilettos.

“BOOST THAT BASS“ is one of the most contrastive tracks on the album, and for precisely that reason one of the most interesting. MOMARZ pushes the saturation into rough territory: a male bass echo accompanies chords one after another, muffled male and female voices surface through the texture, and the atmosphere shifts from the dance floor to the ring. For synthwave, this is a rare thematic direction — the genre more often channels aggression through nostalgia or melancholy than head-on. Here, aggression becomes a self-sufficient emotion, and the album acquires a shade of brutality that would have been difficult to expect at the beginning. From the outside, it looks like a genre fracture; from the inside, it is a precisely calculated shift in register.

“Unseen By Human Eyes“ is possibly the most delicate work on the album. All keyboard parts are set free: the piano roams across the entire territory of the track, the synthwave recedes into the background, and the atmosphere of an empty hall becomes the protagonist. This is a track about emptiness — and yet it is filled to the brim. Ghosts in an empty hall playing for no one but themselves. MOMARZ here deliberately removes the pressure and allows the album to breathe. Sixteen tracks demand pauses like these — otherwise, the record becomes exhausting, and the author understands this.

The surge arrives with “Dynamic Energy“ — a fully synthetic track that glitters with the sparks of live wires. The theme of electricity here is literal: the sonic palette is built from discharges, short circuits, pulsations on the verge of overload. The vocal lies atop the synthesizer lines as a warning of pain — touch it and you get shocked. The track only charges up from this: danger becomes drive, a crimson cluster of energy expands to fill the scale of an entire room. This is, arguably, the most direct track on the album — minimal concept, maximum impact.

“Asteroid Belt“ is the culmination of the cosmic line that has always been genetically embedded in synthwave. MOMARZ drifts into open space, and the Yamaha P-125 here appears to be running at full capacity: synth roulades, sudden turns, vivid and memorable colors. The depth of futurism reaches a point where the genre cell of synthwave stretches into something larger — almost into cosmic jazz, almost into ambient space music, almost into a soundtrack for a film still awaiting its director. The track sits at the album’s core — you can launch from it and you can return to it.

The record closes with “Truth & Glitches“ — and here MOMARZ makes a curious move. Instead of a finale on a high note, he chooses a descent into darkness: a driving rhythm, deep passages, mysticism, futuristic effects from some video game whose name has already been lost to the dark. The album ends at the point of maximum departure from reality — the listener’s consciousness finds itself fully beyond the boundary of the virtual, and that is exactly where MOMARZ wants to leave it.

THE THEORY is an album that would be easy to fault for greed. Sixteen tracks is a lot for synthwave; in places, the record sags, in places the themes repeat, and the tracks I have discussed here are the obvious peaks, between which there are stretches of level plain. On a long synthwave album, there is always the risk that the third neon arpeggio in a row will start sounding like a repetition of the first, and THE THEORY comes close to that risk.

But it is precisely in this excess that its character resides. MOMARZ refuses to edit the album to the contemporary standards of streaming attention, where twenty-eight minutes is considered the optimal length and any extra track is suspected of padding. He makes a big album because he has a big route: a club, a dance floor, a boxing ring, an empty hall, an electric room, an asteroid belt, digital void. To traverse this route, you need sixteen tracks. Fewer means throwing away a door. And MOMARZ chooses to keep all the doors, even those that open onto repeating corridors.

Synth fans will appreciate the expanded catalogue of genre possibilities — there is dance-floor synthwave here, and dark synth, and cosmic synth, and lo-fi elements, and even brief piano pauses that add emotional depth to the record. The casual listener will find two or three entry points: “Party Moves” — the door from the street, “The Theory” — the conceptual center, “Asteroid Belt” — the most breathtaking frame. The advanced listener will value the architecture of the whole: sixteen tracks lay out a trajectory along which MOMARZ proves that synthwave is capable of feature-length storytelling — provided the author puts in the work.

This is a rare quality for the genre, and it is precisely what makes MOMARZ‘s record interesting even to those who feel lukewarm about synthwave. Synthwave here serves as the engine — and that engine starts up just fine.

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