Just as modern pop music is trending towards becoming more and more of a singular effort as time progresses, so too are its personalized aspects growing as well. When the music itself is relatively untouched by external sources in the songwriting and/or production process, it lends quite a large amount of open space for artists to fully translate their deepest and truest beings onto a given track. This is most often done – given our tumultuous modern times – in a depressive or at the very least melancholic manner.
That type of narrative building through pop music has been expertly translated time and time again by one of the genre’s steadiest rising talents in ONE YEAR. The always-sentimental purveyor of underground pop has made a living out of crafting vivid depictions of whatever his mental state may be at a given time, and this transparency has gone hand-in-hand with how effective his music is from a sonic standpoint in the process.
In utilizing the wide-open environment in which to be this transparent – an environment he has helped to create and normalize for years on end now – he is able to come through with such outstanding tracks like the recently-released “Willow.”
This single stands to reason as one of his absolute finest works to date, and it truly comes down to how well he effectively submerges the listener in this world of sorrow that is obviously very real as far as what he is going through given the context of the narrative itself. The poetic hook he delivers from the does just as good of a job at being an encapsulation of these feelings in one package as it does as being an earworm on its own. The given verse that directly follows it is far more fast-paced in comparison, matching the back-and-forth passages that leave his mind as the track continues forward.
These facets are all backed up by a typically-harrowing beat by 4am, who has done the absolute most as a production entity to lay claim to being the best at this type of instrumental as a whole. No one is able to ideally translate these feelings of dejection and depression better than he has time and time again, and it is truly no wonder why he is known as being among the best producers at this type of craft to this point in history.
What “Willow” symbolizes from the furthest spectacle imaginable is the simple fact that ONE YEAR is an incredible storyteller and poet alike. Not many artists can do capture these feelings as well as he does, and in doing so for such a long time now, he has essentially served as the forefront figure of a songwriting style that is now certainly of the norm within the scene he has helped to create.