Someone posted about shadynasty on Twitter recently, claiming that they were a precursor to acts like Hey, Ily. I have no idea if that is true or if the personality behind Hey, Ily has even heard of this band. But I do think it is interesting to point out how long folks have been sequencing chiptunes into emo jams. It seems like this should have been going on for a while longer than it actually has, though. Give the nostalgia that a lot of emo and pop-punk bands had for the '80s, particularly retro electronics, during the first decade of the new Millennium, you would have thought that this style would have been well established by the mid-10s. Nostalgia for Reagan-era sounds metastasized in a lot of weird ways over the past 30 years- not the least of which was a manga-style comic book that combined retro gaming with pop-punk. How it is that Scott Pilgrim didn't coexist with a wave of chirpy, 8-bit pop-punk will baffle music scholars (or just me) for decades to come. As it is, shadynasty is one of the only bands to match my imagination's impression of what Sex Bob-Omb would have sounded like, and their EP ✌Curtis✌ is one of the earliest records I've come across that integrates chiptunes with the style of emo you could rightfully coin a "revival" as of 2014. And while shadynasty doesn't predate Here Between You Me, I can't find any evidence that the aforementioned band ever released anything but a handful of singles and a split- a fact that makes shadynasty all the more noteworthy. Now it might not be particularly surprising or unusual to hear GameBoy soundcard produced effects and melodies in a live band setting as of 2014, but what is remarkable is the extent that the chiptune melodies are doing the lifting within their sound- by which I mean, the chiptunes are doing almost all of the lifting. Even when you can pick up on guitars and acoustic drums in the mix, they are far in the back, playing an entirely supportive role. This was definitely an odd aesthetic choice, but it's one that really works for shadynasty and definitely makes their sound distinguishable and unique. If not influential on their own, they're at least a novel-sounding band who had some great ideas, some of which ended up being ahead of their time- which ironically, means that they were very firmly rooted in the past.
