“Are we gonna talk?” It is one of those questions that starts out sounding like an invitation and ends up sounding rather more like an ultimatum. Or perhaps, more accurately, the last desperate attempt at conversation before you realise that you are in fact having a conversation with yourself.

That is the starting point for David Diaz and “Are We Gonna Talk?”, a song born from the collapse of a friendship and the increasingly familiar experience of being the person who keeps showing up while the other person quietly stops bothering. Diaz apparently went home, wrote the song that very night and recorded the original demo almost immediately. Which feels about right. Some songs are carefully considered; others arrive because you have reached the point where you have to get the thing out of your head before it drives you mad.

And yet, for all that emotional frustration, this is not some miserable wallow. Far from it.

Diaz has wrapped his disillusionment in the sort of glossy, synth-driven pop that makes you want to move around the room while contemplating your own questionable relationship decisions. There are driving drums, pulsing keyboards, funky rhythms and layers of vocals, all drawing heavily on that wonderful ’80s intersection where new wave, synth-pop and mainstream pop stopped worrying about which box they belonged in and simply got on with making great records.

You can hear the nostalgia, certainly, but there is something more interesting happening than simple retro cosplay. Diaz isn’t attempting to recreate 1985 with a rack of vintage keyboards and a wardrobe full of shoulder pads. He is taking the emotional vocabulary of that era and running it through a contemporary pop sensibility.

And then there are those vocals. Diaz deliberately leaves some of the rougher edges intact, with distorted and overdriven passages that give the song an almost telephone-speaker quality. It is a neat production trick because the subject matter is, after all, about trying to get through to somebody who isn’t answering. The technology becomes part of the emotional landscape.

The lyrics are essentially about disappointment, silence and the exhausting realisation that a relationship has become one-sided. The music, meanwhile, is having a bloody good time. That contrast gives the song its personality.

It would also be easy to assume that this is one of those songs destined to remain permanently attached to the grievance that inspired it. But life, fortunately, has a habit of refusing to follow the script. The friend who inspired the song eventually heard it. The two reconciled. Diaz can now look back on the whole episode with enough distance to find the funny side.

Which rather changes the meaning of the song. What began as a demand for an explanation becomes something closer to a document of a particular moment: the point where you stop trying to force an answer from somebody else and start deciding what you are going to do with the silence.

There is a similar sense of liberation in Diaz’s return to releasing music. After stepping away from solo releases, he seems to have rediscovered the rather unfashionable idea that making music might actually be enjoyable when you stop worrying quite so much about what it is supposed to achieve. No desperate chasing of numbers, no obsession with being famous, no requirement to be everything to everybody.

And perhaps that is why “Are We Gonna Talk?” feels so comfortable in its own skin. It doesn’t seem particularly interested in convincing everyone to listen. It just wants to find the people who will hear themselves somewhere in it.

So yes, David, eventually we are gonna talk. But in the meantime, turn the synths up.

Connect with David Diaz:

Website / Spotify / YouTube Music