London O’Connor is 24 years old, but outside of that basic fact, seems very much a teenager. He’s successfully avoided accumulating even the basic trappings of adulthood—the only things he seems to own are a skateboard, a backpack full of clothes, and some portable gear, and he exists in sort of a perpetual cruise around New York City, crashing on the couches of friends in between peregrinations. His Tumblr posts and interviews so far have had a slumber-partyish confessional quality, and he’s quick to bring up the fact that he didn’t lose his virginity until just before his 21st birthday. He’s got a babyface, an unguarded smile, and the struggle dirt stache of someone who hopes the guy at the door thinks his fake I.D.’s legit.
Despite spending the past six years carving out an enviable home for himself on the fashionable end of the New York creative scene (including a stint in photographer Ryan McGinley’s crew of ethereally young and beautiful models), on his debut album O∆, O’Connor returns to his frustratingly hemmed-in experience growing up in the sedate San Diego suburb of San Marcos, California. The lyrics follow him through an archetypal day as he wanders around feeling alienated, ponders the effect of the Internet on his IRL friendships, records voice memo "Captain’s logs," feels weird about a girl, and steals a garden gnome off someone’s lawn. The subject matter’s typical high school shit that should be achingly familiar to anyone who’s ever been on the scary, confusing brink of adulthood and trapped in a nowhere town, but he imbues them with the immediacy and world-encompassing gravity of someone living through it for the first time. It’s easy to feel like you’re right there with him.
On top of his strings-free living situation and fixation on his high school days, O’Connor’s got a teenager’s complicated mix of childlike and adult natures, and the interplay between innocence and sophistication is the axis that O∆ revolves around, and the friction that generates its boundless energy. At first glance it might seem like an almost amateurishly simple album, with chintzy synth sounds, drum beats straight off an old Casio, and major-key melodies that project an aura of Daniel Johnston-like naivete.
O’Connor’s no outsider musician, though—he originally moved to New York to attend NYU’s heavily industry-connected Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, and one of the couches he crashes on belongs to Nick Sansano, who produced Daydream Nation and engineered Fear of a Black Planet—and behind the candy-like facade, O∆ is a technically masterful record. O’Connor packs his songs with melodies and countermelodies that whirl past each other in neatly choreographed movements spiked with acrobatic leaps and twists. The production might suggest thrift store keyboards, but the tones are actually clean and rich, and deftly arranged to fill in a comfortable amount of audio spectrum without any extra clutter. It’s as expertly constructed a pop album as anything that will be released this year, and the most impressive thing about it is that O’Connor makes it all look so effortless that you can actually believe he just stumbled into making it by accident.
O’Connor’s a true eccentric, but O∆ has a universal appeal. The hooks are so intensely hooky that you can find yourself singing along to them without even knowing it. It’s infectiously joyous, and even when the songs turn sentimental and sweetly sad there’s still the uplifting energetic charge of witnessing an artist figuring out the extent of their powers. The infinitely catchy refrain on his single "GUTS"—"I hate your gu-uuu-uuu-uuu-uuuts"—makes it a cathartic sing-along jam on par with Beck’s "Loser" and Cee-Lo’s "Fuck You". As odd as the album is, it could very conceivably turn him into a pop star. I’ve been daydreaming about what that would look and sound like, which might be unfair to an artist who’s just getting started, and if O∆ weren't so good at dominating my attention the idea might be a distraction. But just think about it—if he made something this good out of the most boring parts of his past, what’s going to happen when he sets his sights on the future?
