New York City singer-songwriter and producer ADE has released his cosmic new EP ‘Junk In Orbit’, along with spacey focus track “Ambivert”.
Like a lone shooting star slicing through a bewildering and boundless night sky, “Ambivert” sees Ade cut through the noise of our online age with an expert alloy of sleek synthesisers and fizzing pop polish.
Ever the musical shapeshifter, Ade cites Mark Mothersbaugh and Blink-182 as inspirations as he cheekily blends these influences with internet-induced anxiety and sharp-tongued humour.
With more affable and introspective moments pitted against meteoric choruses that bubble over with squirming synths, clattering drum crashes and a deluge of driving guitars, the track is “written from the perspective of someone hopelessly tangled in the barbed wire of the ungovernable Metaverse: a confused and oblivious Ambivert.”
Ade explains:
“I was scrolling on Twitter and saw this clickbait-y headline from a reputable news outlet that read ‘You might be an Ambivert’. I learned that an Ambivert is someone who is ‘sometimes introverted, sometimes extroverted.’ It seemed to be a perfect metaphor for the era we live in, overwhelmed by the paradoxes of the social media landscape. When fitting in means being forced to engage with such an inherently superficial environment, it’s no coincidence we seek out new diagnoses.”
Fusing electronic bedroom pop with overblown basement pop-punk, the track comes complete with an surrealist official video directed and animated by Oliver Levine, with prop fabrications by Phoebe Jane Hart. Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Taken from Ade’s new EP (also out 4 November), “Ambivert” is joined by apocalyptic anti-anthem and title-track “Junk In Orbit” as well as previously unheard cut “One Of Us”, a slo-mo and celestial pop ballad with ‘60s rock infections and expansive instrumentals.
A collection of “pandemic songs” that play out like a cut-and-paste set of personal reflections for the artist, the interstellar extended play was written during lockdown but feels just as prophetic and pertinent today.
Of the EP, Ade says:
“The depths of that first quarantine was, for many of us, an overwhelming house-arrest moving simultaneously in slow-motion and hyper-speed. A glimpse into some dystopian, online future in which our primary experience of the outside world is through our feeds: often grotesque, unhinged and sloppily tailored algorithms bombarding us with misinformation, celebrity, political and systemic failure, Animal Crossing, cooking videos, conspiracy, astrology, unsolicited photos of our exes and any number of pre-pandemic ephemera.”
After establishing himself as an innovative new voice in alt-pop with his abstract debut record ‘Midnight Pizza’ last year, New York City singer-songwriter and producer Ade combines technological advancement with an eclectic range of personal influences. Citing everything from Bjork to Beck and Backstreet Boys to Weezer as influences on his experimental sound, his own pioneering brand of pop straddles just about everything in-between.
With Paste Magazine praising his ability to “harken back to a tried-and-true trope of infectious grooves with nihilistic undertones” and The Line of Best Fit lauding his “own undeniable style” that “toes the line between pop sensibilities and dancefloor inflections to create a sound that is wholly infectious”, Ade made waves with his hazy dancefloor anthem “Opposites’ earlier this year.
Continuing that boundary-pushing form, the new ‘Junk In Orbit’ EP arrives as testament to Ade’s ability to fuse grim cultural observations with infectious melodies and polished pop spatters.