![]() Sonically, production-wise, the way it comes in and stops at random parts makes it feel almost religious. Her voice kind of warbles a little bit, and that just adds to the overall sense of vulnerability, honesty, and humility that the lyrics pose. “There’s plenty of Janet Jackson songs, but that one in particular, the way she starts it - it’s very bare. Below, Gallant walks us through five songs that helped inform Ology. But it all seemed to be under the umbrella of some kind of apology.” To get back on track, he revisited the sounds of his youth that got him here in the first place. “It just felt like I was studying for something with no tools to know what the direction was. “ I wanted to make sure I wasn’t regressing, in terms of becoming a better human,” he remembers of feeling disoriented prior to making Ology. ![]() His debut album Ology, out now, formed after depression drifted him away from New York City to Los Angeles, toward a familiar feeling of life in the suburbs where he could face himself and his most guarded emotions. “That influences how to label a sound, or write it off.”īut if labels still function as a necessary reference point for the uninitiated, it’s better to think of his sound as simply human. “ There’s some racial undertones with the R&B label, always has been,” he tells Vulture over the phone from SXSW. Having since gone viral off that song - performing with both Sufjan Stevens and Seal along the way - the 24-year-old Maryland native has amassed an online following that has praised him as the next acclaimed voice in R&B, a catch-all even he finds a bit reductive for what he’s trying to accomplish. "House of cards" might have been an early phrase in his mind as he started to write the levitating "Counting," the first line of which is "We built a glass monastery over the fault lines." Tuning out the lyrics isn't necessarily critical to the enjoyment of Ology, not when those words are expressed with comparatively effortless and winning hooks, punctuated by howls that slay.Even before we touted Gallant as one of Vulture’s 20 Musicians You Need to Know in 2016, he was on the fast-track to becoming a name already on everyone’s radar. Last year, at the onset of Apple Music’s debut, Zane Lowe chose Gallant’s breathtakingly sung “ Weight in Gold” as the first World Record to premiere on Beats 1’s inaugural show. In the faith-questioning "Bourbon," a synth-funk slow jam, he compares himself to a headless horseman who somehow has not lost the ability to pray. That song is in a dimension separate from that of, say, Top 15 pop hit "Post to Be," with Gallant and Aiko aching about "skipping stones in washed up brooks." The verses in the relatively current-sounding tracks, most of which are produced by Ajay Bhattacharyya (aka Stint), indicate that Gallant labors over writing metaphors that are often as baffling as they are vivid. A debut full-length refreshingly bold enough to contain one guest appearance from a singer instead of several from rappers, it features only Jhené Aiko, who appears over some of Adrian Younge's psychedelic soul. That's likely the closest Ology, the song's parent album, will get to the mainstream. "Weight in Gold," a bursting modern soul ballad issued in 2015, received a major boost from high-profile disc jockey Zane Lowe, but that support didn't translate into crossover status. At the same time, he went about finding nonstandard and borderline impenetrable ways of detailing inner crises and standard romantic pitfalls. ![]() After he fell in with the independent operation Mind of a Genius, and then a partnership with major label Warner Bros., Gallant's sound started to become more defined, easier to grasp, yet still beyond the periphery of the urban contemporary radio format. It also suggested that Gallant had something unique to add to R&B outside the constrictions of commercial airwaves. The material invited comparisons to Maxwell, Frank Ocean, Miguel, and, all right, the Weeknd - vocalists unafraid of examining emotional damage and desire in falsetto. Stray tracks and an EP of murky art-pop and R&B were self-released by Christopher Gallant during 20.
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