Bedroom pop has become an awkward sort of definition to blanket the minds of a vast creative sphere only held back by journalism’s inability to live without categorical structure. And that only makes this next statement more awkward…

 

Awkward is the best bedroom pop project of the year, exceeding in every way its titling and helping to usher in the name of a youthful music movement that has long been better off unnamed. 

 

Billy Lemos, an exploding name in music whose leading singles toward Awkward helped in defining its utter lack of indefinability, continues to shell out his talent and that of his equally talented and equally undervalued collaborators over the project’s explosive and shuffling quarter hour. His influences seem vast, sometimes informed by hip-hop’s direction (Burb, Hooptie // Drug), other times redefining coffee house jam sessions for the next generation (Rain), and at other times still, ending up with tracks that stem more from his own invention than any pre-existing musical conditions (really, the whole project).

 

And yet, his vast range and ability to transcend genre are not what make him such an important, emergent figure in music. Instead, two unteachable traits stick out:

 

1. His ability to, even across his vast stylistic range and the range of his vastly differing collaborators, unearth coalescence within Awkward’s creative aesthetic.

2. His inability to steal the show from anyone, including himself, granting the project a sense of creative equality.

 

No matter what it’s being called – bedroom pop, mellow pop, indie pop, DIY – a young generation of creatives equipped with more than their computers, but also an understanding of music and the necessity for its experimentation, are delivering us to music’s future. Held together by a laid-back beachy tone and a conscious understanding of modern production, Awkward is Billy Lemos’ vision of that future.

 

One that will surely help shape the future’s greater form.