(Polydor)
The producer’s relentless UK garage-style bombardment feels like standing next to a tween frantically scrolling through TikTok without earbuds
The effect of Covid on British pop music has proved a curious thing. The expected glut of pandemic pop – introverted music powered by loneliness, woe at the state of the world and existential dread – never materialised. Instead, pop looked outward: perhaps as a natural reaction to the privations of the times, or perhaps, more pragmatically, taking note that the big hits during lockdown suggested audiences weren’t terribly interested in wallowing in what had happened. The past few years have been dancefloors and disco balls all the way. Seven months after Britain’s final pandemic restrictions ended, the charts are noticeably devoid of introspection: if anyone did make music like that while stuck at home or staying two metres away from everyone else, they seem to have kept it to themselves. Even Lewis Capaldi, the multi-platinum breakout star of pre-Covid sadboy angst, has returned with a single that leavens his usual brand of romantic calamity with something like a dance beat.
It’s a shift mirrored in the saga of the third album by Mura Masa, as 26-year-old Guernsey-born producer Alex Crossan prefers to be known, who rose to fame five years ago when tropical house was in vogue, before going off-piste with his guitar-heavy second album RYC. His initial thought during Covid was to follow RYC with “a bunch of ponderous and introspective music”. His second thought was apparently to give up music entirely and become a potter. His third was to try the stuff that comprises Demon Time, which couldn’t be less ponderous or introspective if it tried. It’s not just an album that features a song called Prada (I Like It), it’s an album on which a song called Prada (I Like It) ranks among its deeper and more profound statements, where even a solitary throwback to the melancholy style of its predecessor – 2gether, which carries something of Radiohead circa The Bends in its DNA – finds itself unexpectedly disrupted by an incongruous grinding synth drop.
Continue reading...by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian
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