Taken from this week’s Future Pop mailer. Click here to subscribe.
I’ve featured several emo rap artists here recently, but the hip-hop scene isn’t the only place where the influence of emo and other early-00s rock sounds and styles can be seen. It’s also evident in artists such as Twenty One Pilots, Melanie Martinez, and Blackbear, who is both similar to, and a collaborator of, rising star Jeremy Zucker. Jeremy is a 21-year-old singer-songwriter from New Jersey, fresh out of college and ready to launch his music career with the support of Republic Records and Visionary Music Group (the team behind Logic). So far he’s best known for his 2017 Blackbear duet Talk Is Overrated and recent single All the Kids are Depressed. As you might have guessed from its title, the latter has a heavy-handed but valuable message about depression, with a video that I assume his team hoped would go viral. So far it’s doing well, with 2.2 million views and 11 million Spotify plays, but those kinds of numbers are a basic requirement for a new major label signing these days. Young artists being open about mental health issues is always a positive thing, but he’ll need to come out with some tunes that are more than just pleasant if he wants to tackle the charts.