Gus Dapperton makes sweet and frustrated sex songs for a generation that is increasingly not having sex. And how appropriate for these songs to be written, produced, recorded, mixed, and mastered all by the same 22-year-old. The lonely have to do everything themselves.
Where Polly People Go To Read is the young autodidact’s full-length debut, released on the streaming-focused label AWAL, which was expanded last year with a $150 million investment by the publishing company Kobalt. And Gus Dapperton is a good bet, averaging over a million monthly listeners on Spotify for just two self-released EPs. Born Brendan Rice and raised in New York, his sound is a hodgepodge of gauzy pop-rock, evoking Tame Impala, Mac DeMarco, and the 1975, rendered much more bedroom-y by an omnipresent Roland TR-626 drum machine that he bought off eBay. The sense throughout is feelings through a filter, a nostalgia for someone else’s nostalgia.
The songs—not to mention Gus’ foppish stage name or his aggressively idiosyncratic fashion sense, with colorful eyeshadow and very baggy fits, even when he’s just wearing boxers—manage to feel both excitingly personal and a bit disingenuous. The confusion is greatest when he’s being opaque, like on the opening to “Eyes for Ellis”: “Finn loves Ellis/But a skin-tight hope/A thin sequella come amicable/A pinch won’t dwell about the brittle-boned.” If that’s hard to follow, at least he seems aware: “I’m a lot of words for a wannabe,” he sings on the next track. Or consider the album title, which would seem a bold, straightforward claim to polysexuality if Gus hadn’t told an interviewer, “Polly people, poly as in ‘many,’ is this term I invented.”
But you can deal in some light misdirection when you’re so magnetic. His self-directed, million-view music videos usually involve Napoleon Dynamite-like expressive dancing, except everyone is hotter. In casting extras, he often does that only-unique-faces-and-bodies thing that the 1975 did in the “TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME” video and Lil Yachty on the cover to Teenage Emotions. It’s welcoming, and that was certainly the case with the video for “My Favorite Fish,” where some dancing takes place on the roof of a moving boat. The song features an adorable couplet, “I don’t usually fall in love/I’m not used to fa-la-la-la”—the album has a few gems like that, like “I’m not your hero, but I’m here” on “Sockboy”—and it has a catchy, benign funk that wafts in as John Mayer likely wishes he sounded like now.
Much of Gus’ first two EPs had that cushioned vibe to a fault, often so relentlessly soft as to be cloying. Yet at a few key moments on Polly People, he moves beyond a caricature of a bedroom pop star to sound like a fully dimensioned artist. It happens whenever he adopts a semi-guttural, pained growl: the sound is there when he says “I feel like I’m famous” on “World Class Cinema,” or when singing about a love interest’s love interest on “Fill Me Up Anthem.” It sounds like it really hurts, the emotion even more jarring and precise when contrasted with the aimless horniness elsewhere.
Gus didn’t invent this delivery—it’s a defining move of his fellow viral Gen Z auteur Corbin, of whom Gus is a confirmed fan—but it nevertheless transforms his musical persona. In his weakest moments, he might sound like he’s grinding it out alone with this old gear because he is a safe guy and a Casio keyboard is a neutered instrument. But with just the little growl, the cuteness shows a crack, and it’s clear he’s using easy tools and the accessibility of pop to process difficult emotions. Sure, sometimes Polly People sounds like Urban Outfitters smells, but thanks to these moments of humanity, you might find yourself willing to forgive him.
