There is something wonderfully self-referencing, perhaps meta, even, about this debut album from theatrical rock duo HeyBobby! A band setting out to make their mark in the music industry, writing an album about the dangers and hardships facing an artist as they aim to do just that. A work of fiction? An autobiography? A warning? Perhaps all three.
We follow the titular Otilla as she navigates the music industry, the songs shifting in style and hopping genres as different scenes unfold and new backgrounds are introduced. We are presented with the reflective opening salvo, “Anyone Else But Me,” a song that moves between subtlety and explosive anthemics, and with the slow-burn brilliance of “Melt My Chains” as it growls and grows. At one extreme, we have the pop-esque seduction of “Soft Time of Night” and at the other the muscular melody and strut of “Cold Cold World.”
And if HeyBobby! revel in ever-changing sound; they are also masterful at mixing and merging old-school analogue sonics with digital deftness, the human hand with AI artistry, and an attitude that sees them producing a series of AI-generated videos for the tracks, a blend of man and machine indeed.
If you want to know where rock music is today, if you want to visit its multi-disciplinary, world-colliding, cutting-edge, then you could do no better than give The Unclouding of Otilla Vanilla a few spins. It’s rock music, of course, but it is rock music like you haven’t heard before, rock music walking into the blinding light of a new creative sunrise.
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