“Fully formed” is a phrase liberally applied to new artists that come out of nowhere like a freight train and who are so prodigious that you suspect they have been generated in a pop petri dish. Often they are young, so young it’s either that or they must have learned to sight-read in the womb. Billie Eilish is one. Another is Julien Chang from Baltimore, Maryland. He wrote much of his debut album when he was 17 and in high school, absorbing and coalescing swirly, dreamy genres like an sponge.
Chang, now 19, also wrote, produced and recorded Jules himself. His origin myth goes that he was known during his classical and jazz studies at arts school as an unassuming trombone player and then, one summer, he secretly assembled a home studio in his parents’ basement from the money he earned from his grocery shop job. With myriad instruments mastered and presumably a few viewings of Call Me By Your Name later and a one-man wunderkind was born. Yes, fully formed.
His album’s opening track, Deep Green, sounds like a continuation of that longing film soundtrack by Sufjan Stevens before it bursts into lo-fi funk, like Unknown Mortal Orchestra without the polyamory. Other songs recall Blood Orange’s gently undone R&B or the pastoral folk of Fleet Foxes, while Moving Parts seems lifted from the Vampire Weekend songbook of Afro-guitars.
All of that could sound like pastiche but it’s all rather lovely and impossibly sophisticated – and, a bit like Timothée Chalamet, destined for a coming-of-age film near you very soon.
Jules is out on Transgressive Records on 11 October
