In progressive rock (and psychedelic etc) the use of bleeding edge technology to create new sounds has always been a thing. In that genre the transition from organs to synths was really a rather trivial transition for the most part, it was just basically getting the latest models of the things they'd been using anyway. This is also quite apparent from the way they used synths. It was more a big deal for the fans than it was ever musically.
The way prog bands used synths/organs however has relatively little to do where synthpop came from. Even though it's not obvious at the other end, synthpop is part of a rather direct musical heritage that goes punk -> post-punk -> new wave -> synthpop. (Synthpop is sometimes categorized as a subgenre of New Wave. IMO this is highly inaccurate, but let's not fight about that )
Obviously this is a huge simplifcation of the history of those genres, but when you remember that whole transition happened in less than a decade (late seventies to mid eighties), it's pretty easy to understand how some things were the way they were in synthpop. It might not be obvious that synthpop was grandfathered by punk, but the aesthetic preference of keeping it simple was still very much there.
Of course classic disco music was another influence.
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I still go back to Atlas by FM-84 more than any other retro sounding album these days. It's almost perfect, to me. It was mentioned in this thread earlier but I feel like it needs a direct link here:
There is a recent trend on youtube to remix modern pop songs in an 80s production style, a lot of them turn into legitimately great tunes. Here's my favourites -
Check out the Miss Teen Canada pageant in that last one, along with Miss Teen Kamloops.
I’m not a big fan of 80’s synth music as I am a child of the 60’s-70’s.
If any new band embodies the 70’s it is Greta Van Fleet, so reminiscent of Led Zeppelin of which I am a big fan.
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Theyre basically a sound alike band. The singer does a really good Plant impression but the drummer and guitarist are nowhere near Page and Bonham levels. Starting to hear their song at NHL games after whistles more and more.
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