ROHAN’s latest single, Fizzy, is a break-up song. The Melbourne-via-San Francisco songwriter sounds hurt, frustrated, “ripped off.” “You’re full of shit,” he sings in the second verse.
But throughout the guitar-led indie pop song, ROHAN tries to remain equanimous. The chorus ends with the line, “You know, I’m having the very best time.”
“The song is pretty self-explanatory,” ROHAN says, speaking to Beat over Zoom from his home in San Francisco. “It’s about a relationship that kept fizzling out. It was a very toxic relationship, but this song was like, I’m going to be peaceful with it, I’m going to have fun with it, be playful.”
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Both Fizzy and ROHAN’s previous single, I Wish I Could Tell You, also a break-up song, will appear on his forthcoming EP, due later this year. ROHAN counts bands like Green Day and Skegss as formative influences, as well as pop artists Joji, Dominic Fike and SZA.
Traces of ROHAN’s pop-punk influences are evident in Fizzy, but he’s been leaning towards a mainstream pop sound in recent years.
“I try to have some throwback elements where I’m still doing a bit of a pop-punk style in some places, whether it’s one vocal lead or whether it’s an electric guitar, a solo, a nice live drum outro,” he says. “But a lot of the stuff is very much pop now.”
ROHAN was born in Melbourne and lived in Doncaster until he was 12 years old. He moved to Singapore for high school and California for uni. He’s based in San Francisco, working for the wireless gaming company Backbone. But he’s been immersed in music for as long as he can remember.
“My mum signed me up for piano classes when I was three,” he says. “Which is, I feel like, a very Asian mum thing to do, but I got really into it.”
His fascination deepened when his sister introduced him to Green Day. “That was what got me really into music,” he says. “I’d sit across the room from her and she’d play American Idiot and the live video album, Bullet in a Bible, and I just, like, got obsessed.”
The Green Day obsession made ROHAN want to be in a band. So, he got his hands on a guitar and started singing whenever he had the chance.
“I think for a long time I was making stuff that sounded like Green Day,” he says. “I mean, I was literally listening to Green Day and just punk stuff from maybe three to 16. Everyone moved on, but I would still listen to American Idiot and then 21st Century Breakdown came out, and then I was listening to that.”
ROHAN’s taste grew to include indie artists like Youth Lagoon and singer-songwriter Matt Corby. When he moved to the USA to go to uni at Stanford, he started following the San Diego band Beach Goons, which was a turning point.
“Those guys are very, very indie punk, and that’s where I started to branch out, outside of that just straight pop-punk stuff,” he says.
ROHAN worked on his forthcoming EP with engineer Scott McDowell, whose credits include Ty Segall and The Head And The Heart. McDowell introduced ROHAN to drummer Thomas Pridgen, a former member of The Mars Volta and Thundercat’s touring band. Pridgen plays on Fizzy.
“Scott was just like, ‘Dude, we should get Thomas on this track,’” ROHAN says. “And then I hung out with Thomas a few times, took some drum lessons from him as well. He’s really chill.”
The personal nature of Fizzy and I Wish I Could Tell You reflects ROHAN’s tendency to channel his strongest emotions into his songwriting. “It’s like, when I was sad as a kid or angry as a kid, I’d just pick up my instrument and play,” he says. “And it’s the same thing now. I just naturally will go to my guitar and I’ll just naturally start singing.”
In this way, the forthcoming EP is a document of a pivotal phase in ROHAN’s life, one that encompassed as much strife as it did growth.
“I was like, I have something that I really want to talk about, and that’s something really significant that happened in my life, which is this breakup,” ROHAN says. “The idea is it’s the end of an important chapter. And at the same time, I think I was developing my sound with these songs.”
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