Queen’s artist Hadji Gaviota’s latest single OYSTER is best experienced in a car driving along the coast, with your windows down and speakers at full volume with a group of close friends jamming out. It’s young adolescent freedom personified, surging guitars riffs reminiscent of the early 2000’s indie rock movement (Vampire Weekend and Arcade Fire) bouncing off of hip hop inspired beats, creating a modern coming of age movie soundtrack vibe instantly. Then you’ve got his charismatic indie pop heartthrob vocals that flips like a coin between his magnetising rapping, screams of joy that echo into the abyss youth and sweet vocal falsetto that gives Sam Smith a run for his money. Everything combined just makes you want to be apart of this world, his smorgasbord of influences all coming together to form a genreless soundscape that is so warmly inviting and whimsically magnificent.

That’s what I love most about Gaviota’s sound though, he never focusses on genre because he never had focus on it within his own life. Living in New York he was introduced to a plethora of different musical experiences, hearing Bollywood music as walked to the subway, Reggaeton on his school bus, classic rock from his parents, hip hop from Hot 97, you name it he heard it. All these little things all accumulated in the back catalogues of his mind, giving this former teacher an encyclopaedic knowledge of music from across the globe and, as a result, allowed him to create his own interpretation of it. Get your main character moment ASAP with his latest EP PASTIMES.