It’s one of the more interesting things to happen to pop punk sincerity in years.
Most people would probably dismiss I Fight Dragons as another nerd-adjacent power-pop band built for people who own at least one hoodie with thumb holes and complicated opinions about retro gaming hardware. But that’s reducing them unfairly. What they’re actually doing is something much stranger.
The original Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News is fundamentally optimistic. It’s polished. Confident. Almost aggressively reassuring in that very 1980s way where emotions were allowed to sound expensive.
I Fight Dragons understand that song from the perspective of people who grew up after optimism stopped feeling culturally guaranteed.
And that changes everything.
The cover keeps the architecture of the original intact, but recontextualises it through crunchy synths, anxious energy, and the specific emotional frequency of people who learned sincerity through the internet while also being vaguely embarrassed by it.
There’s something deeply millennial about refusing irony just long enough to mean something.
The instrumentation matters here. The electronic textures stop the song becoming pure nostalgia bait. It never tries to be the 1980s. It sounds like remembering the 1980s through second-hand media and emotional inheritance. Like discovering confidence as an aesthetic before experiencing it as a feeling.
And vocally, there’s a kind of determined earnestness that I think a lot of modern bands are terrified of committing to fully. The performance understands that “The power of love is a curious thing” is, objectively, an absurd sentence, but also quietly believes it anyway.
Which is important.
Because beneath all the synthesizers and power-pop momentum, the song is still fundamentally about wanting connection badly enough to risk sounding uncool.
That level of emotional commitment is much harder than cynicism.
Most people miss that.