To be a young person in 2020 is to feel deeply lonely, politically distressed, and rattled with anxiety. It is also, perhaps as a result, to be obsessively nostalgic—for sitcoms, tracksuits, even old memes—clinging to memories and their soothing power. Mura Masa can testify to all of the above. The 23-year-old artist and producer born Alex Crossan recently told Zane Lowe that he spends “all his free time playing old video games, watching cartoons, and eating cereal, arrested development-style,” and revisiting the music that shaped his youth.

All this rearview mirror-gazing laid the foundation for Mura Masa’s sophomore album, R.Y.C. (Raw Youth Collage), a meta-commentary about Gen Z’s fixation with the past. The Guernsey native recycles the sounds that he grew up on—a mix of post-punk, Britpop, emo, and French house—and turns them into contemporary internet-kid anthems about surviving adolescence. It’s a surprising stylistic U-turn for Mura Masa, who is best known as a forward-thinking electronic-pop producer. His debut mixtape paired off-kilter beats with vaguely Japanese flutes and strings, and his first album pinned big voices like A$AP Rocky and Charli XCX into the futuristic corners of UK club music. In both, the songs were tinny and distorted, rich with negative space. R.Y.C., in contrast, is a concept-forward guitar album that explodes with sound and feeling. Taking cues from artists like Justin Vernon, Kevin Parker, and Damon Albarn, all multi-instrumentalists who front larger projects, Crossan takes on the roles of a band, playing guitar, drums, and bass, and singing on nearly every song.

Unlike on his last LP, where Crossan’s guests nearly overshadowed him, the featured artists here—mostly young, DIY, and British—fit neatly into his creative vision. They also drive home the point that R.Y.C. is neither a tribute record nor a wistful toast to the ’90s; in fact, it’s only loosely retrospective. The album’s strongest and most affecting moments, such as the Ellie Rowsell-assisted “Teenage Headache Dreams,” draw on sounds and textures from our recent memory to color a picture that’s unmistakably now.

The album unfolds like a tug-of-war between two coping mechanisms: yearning for the past or passivity against the future. Crossan illustrates this conflict by toggling between two moods: He’s hyperactive and all-caps on “Deal Wiv It,” featuring Slowthai, a yelping, rambunctious rant against gentrification and culture’s oppressively cyclical nature; he’s dazed and meditative on “Today (feat. Tirzah),” a warped, looping bedroom ballad that numbs in its repetition, mirroring the habitual dread of online life. Where R.Y.C. succeeds—and where Crossan reveals a real point of view—is in his ultimate rejection of these initial frameworks in favor of something more fluid, a hybrid space in which these sounds, stylings, and emotional responses work together.

This opens the field up for a few left turns. “In My Mind,” a psychedelic electro-folk song about distrusting your memory, gets submerged in a well of distorted synths and post-dubstep trembles. “Teenage Headache Dreams,” featuring Ellie Rowsell of Wolf Alice, swings from soaring pleas to hushed recollections to a frenzied, electronic head rush. And “I Don’t Think I Can Do This Again,” at first a tender pop song with Clairo, suddenly veers underground when three iconic chords wave in the rave. (The sample was popularized by Basement Jaxx in 2001 but written by Gary Numan in 1979. Crossan, who has two autistic brothers, has said that Numan, an introverted songwriter with Asperger’s syndrome, is one of the artists he most identifies with.)

In the studio Crossan is less reserved, nudging genres and eras up against each other like he’s introducing friends at a party, highlighting what makes them unique while searching for common ground. In doing so, he generally avoids the elementary mawkishness of other recent emo-dance attempts (see: the Chainsmokers) and sometimes gives the featured artist new dimensions. Slowthai, already an invigorating rap force, sounds even fiercer in the fuzzy clutches of post-punk. Similarly, Rowsell’s natural melancholy morphs into heady hopefulness in the ecstatic glow of synth pop and electro.

Mura Masa occasionally trips on cliché and stumbles into pastiche. The platitudinous “Live Like We’re Dancing,” featuring Georgia, feels like an amateurish Robyn knock-off, and the disposable Ned Green interlude about his teenage girlfriend’s bedroom scans as a schmaltzy, faux-earnest play on listener emotion. On “vicarious living anthem,” Crossan disguises his feeble voice in a haze of fuzz and Auto-Tune but can’t escape his fatuous lyrics (“Everyone can be who they want to be!”), predictable guitar melodies, and juvenile overtones that feel contrived and stale. Nostalgia is most powerful when it takes us somewhere new.

“No Hope Generation,” the project’s snappy, sarcastic centerpiece, achieves this. Harnessing the bratty self-deprecation of late-’90s pop-punk and the anxious shuffle of drum’n’bass, Crossan sets off on a 2020 anxiety trip through Gen Z’s preferred methods of self-care: an endless scroll of memes and meds wrapped in safe, sunshiny arrangements. “Everybody do the no-hope generation/The new hip sensation craze sweeping the nation,” he sings archly, addressing generational depression like it’s making the rounds on TikTok. The implication isn’t that all this malaise doesn’t matter, but rather that, like viral dances, music trends, and precious youth, it won’t last. “I feel so relaxed/I feel so relaxed/I feel so relaxed,” he insists suspiciously after asking for a bottle and gun. There’s something about the song’s casual angst and playful duplicitousness that feels the most like teendom—restless, reckless, fleeting.

Buy: Rough Trade

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