Exploring the surrealistic landscape in James WLDE’s latest EP BOY./ALIEN.
I first met James about a year and a half ago at a launch party for Pilot in central London. We were smoking outside the venue, and I think he asked me for a light. It was drizzling and my friends and I were huddled together, shielding ourselves from the rain with our various animal print coats. The light emanating from the streetlamps looked subdued and blurry against the rainy sky.
It’s funny to think that a year and a half later, I’d be listening to his latest EP BOY./ALIEN in a setting entirely different to the one I met him in: Sitting poolside in Los Angeles, basking in the dry heat while eating an acai bowl. However, within the first thirty seconds of the EP, the lush, airy landscape of Southern California (along with my overheated acai bowl) melted and was replaced by a darker, more velvety atmosphere.
The first song, “something (to keep you alive)”, grounded me in a world that was sultry yet devastating. The hypnotic electronic beat intermixed with lyrics like ‘So alone, nights at my worst, I convulse yeah I burst in two’ made it feel like I was listening to a dramatic soliloquy, with James, our tragic narrator, belting out his pain to an empty room.
The second song, “ONLYMAN (the finer things)”, follows a young artist as she navigates her way through a superfluous and toxic lifestyle. Despite the poignancy of the lyrics in the first two songs, the accompanying beats are playful and invigorating. This is where James’ true genius comes into play. It’s like he’s wrapping the fragile, irrevocable tragedies of life in a bright pink, semi-translucent paper. On the surface, what James presents us with is a pretty and inviting parcel. It’s only when we get close enough or start tearing the paper away that we start to see the ugliness beneath it.
Furthering this facade in the third song, “DIZZ // THE OPHELIA COMPLEX”, James erects a strong visual world that plays out in vignettes of nightlife in London. The two characters drift insensibly through the city, high on drugs, hedonism, and their love for one another. Yet, the lines between reality and psychedelia become increasingly dissolute.
‘I had an image,’ James tells me, ‘throughout the EP of damaged people, often struggling with internal conflicts.’The song’s beauty lies in its surreal and liquid nature. The world it creates is saturated with opacities and vibrant swathes of color—like a Pollock painting transmuted into sound. The characters, like Hamlet’s Ophelia, find themselves surrounded by water in the sense that they fall prey to fluid and rippled perceptions as they traverse the highs and lows of love and drugs, two sensations that are more or less interchangeable in their universe.
In the last two songs, James slowly peels away the delicate pink sheath from the project’s surface, and reveals the narrator’s unabridged pain. The penultimate track, “IMPERFECT (OR, A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN)”, marks this transition towards a more transparent image of suffering. Lyrics like ‘The opera house is burning down, throw your memories in the fire // When you’re stuck inside the shell you can’t escape’, accompanied by swelling orchestral chords, seem to burst from the seam and cry out in catharsis. It’s as if the narrator has finally reached the tipping point of the surreal fantasy he is immersed in and is demanding to be set free. The song’s title also cleverly points to the likeness between James WLDE, the Irish singer-songwriter, and James Joyce, the Irish novelist—both left their native Dublin, as James says, ‘feeling a lack of connection, only to reassess our relationship to it after our leaving.’
Moving into the final song, “MELANCHOLIA”, James strips down all the emotions he dressed up in the previous songs. The tragedy within his lyrics, no longer blunted by upbeat and flashy instrumentals, comes through clear and focused.
To no one in particular, he sonorously sings ‘I’m the loneliest boy in the world, tonight // But don’t worry I’ll be fine.’ This track functions as the narrator’s ‘comedown’ from the psychedelic illusion he paints throughout the EP; The moment when he’s faced with the sobering truth.
Yet, it’s ambiguous whether or not even this truth can sanctify him. The song ends with the defeatedly-sung lyrics ‘Melancholia, darkest of days // In the rainiest haze, to grab your light so abrasive, melancholia.’ It seems that his confrontation with reality merely replaces his illusions with what could be an even deadlier venom. That is, melancholia.
The EP’s narrative reminded me of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in Greek mythology. Orpheus, a musician, follows his wife Eurydice to the underworld after she dies and begs Hades to let her return with him. Hades agrees, but on the condition that Orpheus must not look back at his wife while exiting the underworld, which he does anyway, and ends up losing her.
Similarly, James tells the story of a man who follows his beloved into a forbidden realm where chaos supersedes order. On his journey back to the land of the living or “reality”, he looks back and, in place of his love, finds the thing that has been haunting him throughout his entire journey: Emptiness.
You can check out James WLDE’s most recent EP BOY./ALIEN on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, and Tidal.
Photos by Shanel Williams