Natasha Khan writes songs that sound not quite of this earth. She spun strange fairy tales on 2006’s Fur and Gold, summoned celestial grandeur on 2009’s Two Suns, invoked intimate magic on 2012’s The Haunted Man. And 2016’s The Bride had the candlelit chill of an old M.R. James story, with Khan singing from the perspective of a woman whose fiancé, killed in a car crash on the way to their wedding, would not rest quietly.

Lost Girls is no less fantastical. Loosely centered around a new character (Nikki Pink) and a gang of biker women who roam the sunset streets of an eerie, make-believe vision of LA, it’s essentially a love letter to the ’80s sci-fi and fantasy films of her youth. She wrote the songs while working on a script of her own, and the starry-eyed, big-screen synth-pop of “Kids in the Dark” sounds like the soundtrack to the big romantic clinch in her own coming-of-age flick.

Otherworldly flourishes are everywhere—but they’re also steeped in nostalgia. Familiar scenes flash by like a supercut of worn-out Blockbuster VHS tapes: vampires jumping off of bridges a la The Lost Boys, an ET-inspired nighttime bike ride, a glimpse of the infamous Hollywood Forever Cemetery that hosted the undead frights in One Dark Night. Dark electronics flicker with the mystery of John Carpenter or swell with the euphoria of John Williams. On standout “The Hunger,” Khan lusts for blood over the throb of a haunted church organ, while a creepy saxophone slithers around what sounds like the bones of a lost Cure song on the gothy instrumental “Vampires.”

It’s a vivid world, although less singular or startling than Khan’s previous creations; these touchstones have become so deeply embedded in the cultural fabric that they offer the same comforting glow as an episode of “Stranger Things” rather than the shock of the new. Lost Girls is richest when Khan puts her own devilish spin on those sacred texts, like the beats that boil and bubble under the shimmering disco of “Feel For You” or the mutated and masochistic Giorgio Moroder banger “So Good.” She has a deliciously macabre ball on “Jasmine,” using her incongruously clipped British accent to narrate a very American horror story in the Hollywood hills. “Little girl cracks your heart in two/Sucks the juice,” she whispers, keyboards pulsing eerily as she revels in the spilled guts and grisly details.

“I know it’s the real thing,” sings Khan longingly on “Kids in the Dark.” It’s a reminder that her magically theatrical songs are most powerful when rooted in simple, stark human needs, from the desperate desire that floods “Peach Sky” to the heartbreak that propels “Mountains” into its crushing coda. It’s far from the most explicit homage here, but in those fraught moments when she’s struggling to get to grips with something huge and scary and thrilling, she sounds just like the overwhelmed kids from her beloved ’80s films—the ones who also got in too deep and had to somehow make sense of the inexplicable, however daunting it seemed.

Buy: Rough Trade

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