Hometown: Detroit.
The lineup: Josh Smith (vocals, guitar, electronics, production), Josh Freed (beats, electronics, production).
The background: Gosh Pith call what they do “cosmic trap” because, they say, “a genre is a cosmic trap at the end of the day”. But the term suits their slow, stoned mix of synthed-up funk, crisp boom-bap and dark basslines. Aware of the power of a good pitch, they also describe their latest single, Gold Chain, as “a ratchet love song about the constant conflict between the meaningful and the meaningless”. If that sounds a tad highfalutin, you could just wallow in the melancholy mire of Josh Smith’s anguished, crepuscular vocals and tremulous, tremolo guitar, and his partner Josh Freed’s spacious, discreetly high-end sonics. They make hanging out at 5am in an expensive uptown apartment surrounded by beautiful people sound somehow like an empty and depressing experience.
Yes, we’re in alt-R&B territory, but there’s something about the mix of sounds that suggest the Joshes belong as much to the quirky US indie end of things: Vampire Weekend crossed with the Weeknd. Smith and Freed met on a camping trip in Ontario as kids, then reconnected a decade later at the University of Michigan, writing their first-ever song in Iggy Pop’s birthplace of Ann Arbor. The unusual inflections in their music come from a variety of influences:J Dilla to Jimi Hendrix, King Crimson to Questlove, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony to the Byrds. Factor in the Motor City’s diverse history – Motown and the MC5 – and you start to see why Gosh Pith can write a song like Vietnam Junkie, sounding like a dub-soul ballad, and one called Prints that sounds like the Strokes if they recorded for Stax. No wonder concert dates so far have included sharing stages with Kero Kero Bonito and Vic Mensa.
Woozy witch house, weirded-out rap, stoner rock, pop: there’s nothing Gosh Pith can’t do with their 1968 Princeton drip edge amp, Roland sampler and fuzz-guitar set-up inside a big house in Detroit that resembles a castle – and is, apparently, haunted. Add that to their formative and “pretty psychedelic” sojourn in Paris, when they were oddly energised by the “daunting mass of culture”, and their inspirational, regular late-night walks around their home city – not to mention the capacious quantities of weed smoked during writing and recording sessions – and you begin to see why their music sounds the way it does. There are echoey, reverb-drenched laptop FX, clattering beats, freaky shredding, and a languid croon as likely to allude to heartbreak as to the sort of nefarious activities – which in the song New Balance includes synthesising a new strain of molly (MDMA or substitutes) and “running from the cops” – that young people tend to get up to after-hours in Detroit. It’s a long way from Dancing In The Street.
The buzz: “Booming trap bass, melancholic tremolo guitars and plaintive 5am vocals.”
The truth: They’re Vampire Weekend meets the Weeknd.
Most likely to: Stand in the shadows of love.
Least likely to: Stop! In the name of love.
What to buy: The Gold Chain EP is due in early 2016.
File next to: Animal Collective, Drake.
Links: soundcloud.com/gosh-pith.
Ones to watch: Cappa, Abra, Tory Lanez, Porches, Barns Courtney.
