yllwblly

Birthing yllwblly’s debut album, Land Lover, was a long, stilted process. A self-taught singer, songwriter, and producer since his teen years, the record was born from the artist’s turn to creative ritual to document and cope with the collapse of a formative relationship in 2015. Written in the early mornings before an office job, Land Lover sees the then 23-year-old songwriter linger in the old wounds, bad dreams, and what-ifs of love and loss.

Though relegated by day jobs to notebooks and hard drives for the better part of four years, Land Lover, out February 2020, is brimming with fresh creative energy. Equal parts sparse and lush, brutal and beautiful, yllwblly flirts with genres—dream pop, folk, psychedelia—but refuses to linger too long in any one sound: “I Hope You’ll Get Yours in the End” jangles with the frenetic energy of The Mountain Goats, while “Trigger” begins as a stripped-down acoustic ballad before blooming into a psychedelic climax reminiscent of acts like Tame Impala.

What anchors the record is the artist’s ear for melody and a craftsman’s approach to songwriting, with arrangements that twist and evolve from raw minimalism to saturated dreamscapes. With over four years separating the record’s inception and completion, it bears the markings of an older, wiser artist returning to the scene of the past—exploring the contours of a relationship faded, as the artist sings on “Trigger,” like “a memory of a dream I half-forgot.”