Man, the mid-late 2000s emo scene was a god damn era. For me it meant a fucking gross haircut, a love for anything that sounded sad / had someone yelling in it and some baller coloured skinny jeans from JayJays. Whilst most of these emos have moved on to other sad things like sad folk music, post-punk, Sufjan Stevens… there’s a new wave of emo kids. But these kids are way cooler. They like to hit the clubs, eat Tide Pods and listen to Lil Peep (RIP). I can’t say I fit into this category anymore, I feel like the new era of emo belongs to someone like Darcy Baylis. On the back of his critically acclaimed LP, Intimacy & Isolation, the multi-faceted Melburnian is back with ‘The Taste of Cherry’. It moves away from the melancholic club tracks from that LP, with a trap beat at the heart of the new single, but it doubles down on the emotive songwriting Darcy is king at. This track breaks me, and yet it’s a complete earworm. I guess I’ve been classically conditioned to salivate whenever I hear something sad paired with some shit hot production.
‘The Taste of Cherry’ is out now via Good Manners Records.
Photo Credit: Eliott Lauren