Along with the announcement that an album is due out next month, mellow pop experimentalist, Billy Lemos has released Different World – an allusion perhaps to where he hopes to take his listeners with new music. Lemos has always been, after all, a bizarrely bold crafter of musical nuances hard to source, but easy to listen to, and Different World falls right in line.

 

No, there’s nothing wrong with your headphones; yes, that’s just Lemos hammering twitchy externalities into his production; yes, it’s a bop. Brimming with vibrant distortion beyond his production technique and deep into his wavering vocalism, Lemos does what he’s always done by making music that even when weighed against his own prior deliveries, feels removed from what we know. And yet, akin to his past, Different World, though too from a different musical space, works one two unrelated scales: as a gorgeous exploration of his electronically-nuanced bedroom pop experimentation; as a bold statement that artists are people, that people are complex, and that thus music doesn’t have to reflect the expected.