In 1982, the British singer-songwriter Martin Fry and his band ABC conquered the U.K. charts with The Lexicon of Love, an album that injected the fashion-obsessed superficiality of the New Romantic movement with dollops of wit and blue-eyed soul. It also had so much youthful effervescence that the music still packs a punch.

The group’s only original member, the 58-year-old Fry still performs under the ABC name. And now he has finally written and recorded an official follow-up to his best-known album. Appropriately titled The Lexicon of Love II (Virgin EMI), it revisits its predecessor’s musical and conceptual motifs without sounding forced or nostalgic.

One obvious musical connection is The Art of Noise’s Anne Dudley, who, as she did 34 years ago, gilds Fry’s melodies with string arrangements that serve as a cipher for Sinatra-esque class (“Confessions of a Fool,” “Ten Below Zero”) or that nudge Fry toward art song (“The Love Inside the Love”).

A more obvious musical connection is Fry’s voice. Its expressiveness has increased—Fry has learned to restrict his crescendo-prone tendencies and often sings softly nowadays without suggesting diminished passion or strength. That improvement aside, his voice hasn’t changed at all.

The conceptual connection is that every song finds Fry playing the role of a vulnerable romantic, one who, while only hinting at depths rather than plumbing them, resists the tasteless or self-aggrandizing undertows that claim many a younger contemporary performer. When he sings “I’m a man out of time” in the reflective “Brighter Than the Sun,” you understand what he means.

Actually, “Brighter Than the Sun” is the only song that feels out of place. Set to an electric-keyboard riff redolent of 1970s prog rock, it could pass for an Alan Parsons Project outtake. But even that song succeeds on its own merits, not least because in it Fry gives voice to a wisdom (“I’m not crazy ’bout the trash they praise / or the flags they wave these days”) commensurate with his advancing age.

Fry isn’t the first pop star of note to create an impressive sequel to one of his own landmark recordings. Both Meat Loaf and Alice Cooper avoided the reheated-leftover syndrome with their fan-acclaimed Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell and Welcome 2 My Nightmare respectively. If, however, Fry turns out to be the last such performer, he will have not only brought the tradition to a graceful conclusion but also, so to speak, ended it on a higher note.

Tiger games

Playing Games with the Shadow (Blind Thief) finds Kevin Max, the former DC Talk and Audio Adrenaline singer, also drawing upon the ’80s for inspiration. “I was listening to a lot of my favorite ’80s new wave artists,” he told The Noise Maker, citing the British bands Japan and The Cure in particular. “I think that really informed the style of this project.”

Like Fry, however, Max hasn’t settled for merely re-creating a sound or a mood. Indeed, had Playing Games with the Shadow come out in the early ’80s, its sharpness of attack and ever-shifting textures would’ve blown much of the competition away.

At any rate, ’80s new wave doesn’t influence the album as much as William Blake and the tiger he famously celebrated in Songs of Experience. There are songs titled “William Blake” and “Girl with the Tiger Eyes” and cover art depicting a “tyger, tyger, burning bright.” It’s against this backdrop that Max waxes lyrical, essentially—and impressively—allowing the better angels of his nature to wrestle him to a draw. —A.O.