When the California musician zayALLCAPS was a teenager, his home state was very high, very horny, and very unsure what to do about it. In Los Angeles, Stones Throw was churning out breezy synth-funk; a $10 Uber away in Fairfax, Tyler, the Creator was pirating those same beats to rap about kidnapping his crushes. Woozy, weed-brained R&B was a shared musical language, but among the fluent, there was a tonal gap: earnestness, à la the Internet, versus edginess, à la (the rest of) Odd Future. A hidden consequence, looking back, was the illusion that swag and sincerity were mutually exclusive. Today, for some former Golf Wang shoppers, well-packaged rage remains the answer. Others feel earnestness is more appealing, finding that “You bring me joy” ages a teeny bit better than “I’ll fuck the freckles off your face.”
zayALLCAPS is eclectic enough to fill the gray area and inventive enough to color it in. On “Picklez3,” a standout from last year’s iMessage Platinum: Hosted by autotuneKaraoke, he flits over a surgical rework of the Matt Martians earworm “Southern Isolation,” temp-checking before the basses, plural, drop: live and digital alike, the sub-bass an odd newcomer to the original’s jazz-club soulscape. Fused together, they form a sort of drunken stagger, wrestling between two attitudes, two eras. And slick as Zay may sound, he isn’t flexing, or flopping, but something in-between: “doing pretty good,” “feeling sorta like a man,” “trying hard” to brag “just a little.” The beat is suspended between two extremes, and he is, too—swag-aspirant, but so comfortable that he ends up sounding swagged-out anyway.
On art Pop * pop art, his latest and best album, zayALLCAPS commits to this impulse to complicate familiar templates: not merely indulging in blog-era nostalgia, but reworking the anatomy of a love song circa 2010. Take the brilliant dirty macking of “MTV’s Pimp My Ride,” which uses the titular show as a metaphor for liking a girl who already has a man: “You know I seen your old ride/That’s a hunk of junk.” Dump your boyfriend is a familiar premise, but the methodology—thirsty-ass vocal harmonies, heavyweight hook, inventive analogy—is so raw and freewheeling, it feels like it’s never been done before.
In a recent interview, zayALLCAPs described the name of his record label, autotuneKaraoke, as “a juxtaposition” between “robotic” pitch correction and “hella human” karaoke vocals. On paper, sure, it’s a contradiction. But across art Pop * pop art, he makes a strong case for the intimacy of vocal modulation, not hiding behind effects but using them to contour his humanity. This is why a well-produced song like “PROCESS” doesn’t feel pretentious: He’s singing his ass off with Auto-Tune, but it only works this well because he’s also beat-boxing the drums.
“Work it Out” almost parodies the robotic pep of “The New Workout Plan,” but centers a zany, chipmunked synth, as if Kanye had up-pitched the MIDI instead of the sample. Crackly and stretched beyond their capacity, the shrilling chords feel more desperate, more human, than a pitch-shifted choir. The offbeat “Love In U” is delightfully weird, in part because it’s so damn simple: that warped vocal effect isn’t a plug-in, it’s a makeshift ensemble of other takes, layered and sloppily stitched together.
art Pop * pop art is a deceptively easy listen—catchy and breezy enough to conceal both how weird the songs are and the years that zayALLCAPS dedicated to his musical education before successfully subverting it. On its best track, the shifty “Friendz U Can Kiss,” bass stabs fall in and out of sync with a backbeat, a backing vocal, and a rotating cast of keys. It describes a love affair that’s a lot like a zayALLCAPS song: so sexy that you barely recognize, or care, how strange things are. “I was doing hella shit,” the chorus goes, “but she just tryna fuck!” He’s doing hella shit, and if you listen closely, you can tell. No need, though—just have a good time. He’s made it pretty easy.
