George Miller began making waves as Filthy Frank, a YouTube comedian who gained a massive following for his skits that toed the line of poor taste, or rather showed no regard for taste at all. He’s topped the iTunes album chart before as Pink Guy, a character from the skits with song titles such as ‘Please Stop Calling Me Gay’ and ‘I Will Get a Vasectomy’. Joji is his ‘serious’ project that began gaining attention on the strength of songs like ‘thom’ and his Daughter sampling ‘medicine’ beat. Sensing it was time to transition away from eating hair cake, Joji joined the 88rising label/collective and now has released ‘Will He’, the first single from his debut commercial EP.
‘Will He’ definitely fits into the lo-fi hip hop mould that most of Joji’s output has sat in previously. Lo-fi hip hop as a genre can seem almost homogenous; while there is a lot of good stuff out there, it’s simplicity has lead to an over saturation of songs sharing the same formula of moody piano sample over soft drum loop and ‘Will He’ doesn’t go too far out of the box. The things that set Joji apart are the production quality (it’s a really good moody piano sample, plus the recording definitely isn’t ‘lo-fi’) and his voice which, while perhaps not particularly strong, is unique enough in its melancholic, obscured delivery.
The lyrics are similarly blurry, initially dealing in relatable generalisations and cliché (“Will your tongue still remember the taste of my lips?”), but the twist at the end of the second verse, “Will he treat you like shit just the way that I did?/ ‘Cause I don’t blame you”, turns the song from a “why did she leave me?” platitude to a more mature, nuanced reflection on his own failings. It’s a confident commercial debut, but whether Joji can do enough to fully stand out from the endless stream of similar tracks that appear on those YouTube ‘beats to study to’ livestreams remains to be seen, but there’s every reason to have hope for the EP In Tongues, out November 3rd.
Words by Jack Hollis