Chillwave may have come and gone, but its woozy footprints are everywhere: lofi hip-hop beats, Tame Impala's continued dominance as a festival headliner, the endless barrage of shapeless AI synth tracks... The scene that Chaz Bear came up through as Toro y Moi has found real staying power in the current ecosystem of inoffensive... sounds engineered for Maximum Vibe Wattage.
Bear has expanded to working with mainstream collaborators like Flume and Travis Scott. His new Toro y Moi project, Hole Erth, is a reference to the esoteric counterculture magazine Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs once referred to as a 'paperback Google.'... Unlike his 2015 mixtape, where Bear experimented with R&B samples... Hole Erth struggles to sound like anything but an imitation.
It's hard to fault Bear for trying out emo-rap when he's been on the periphery of both since 24kGoldn was in kindergarten... But herein lies the problem: He's now 37, sounding every bit his age as he adopts the cadence of music made almost exclusively by and for people younger than iTunes.
'We back like bad teenagers,' Bear proclaims on 'Walking in the Rain,' a would-be Astroworld leftover complete with hyperspace synths and Auto-Tuned interjections. 'Off Road' sounds like a Roddy Ricch song.
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