The California native has long been a fan of pop music and, thanks to his reputation and his talent, he’s able to maintain credibility when it comes to the genre, which has been shrouded in criticism for its cut-and-paste aesthetic. “I don’t know how ‘pop’ records got such a bad name,” he says down the line, from a coffee shop in Berkeley. “A lot of people say it went downhill in the early 2000s, when all this bubblegum pop was released and it all sounded like it was made in a factory. Maybe that ruined pop music – that, and production techniques like Auto-Tune. Artists don’t even sing songs anymore, and that’s really pathetic. To sing a song the whole way through instead of just copying and pasting stuff, that’s important.”
It was his 2011 full-length, Underneath The Pine, that solidified Bundick’s key position in the world of ‘chillwave’, a fuzzy, chilled-out, production-laden genre that has been critiqued more than it has actually been defined. Bundick understands what a buzz word ‘chillwave’ became, but isn’t yet sick of the term. “If anything, I’m totally embracing it,” says the eloquent and soft-spoken 26-year-old. “I’m not shunning it. I’m flattered to be so closely associated with the genre, the word. If I make a psychedelic rock song and people start calling it chillwave, then that’s what they’ll do. But that’s not what I intended to do with it.
“I have songs that I might call ‘80s boogie, but people are going to call it what they will,” he continues. “I’m not trying to escape anything in terms of genres. I was around before that term even existed, so it’s interesting to see how it’s kind of grown.”
As it turns out, Bundick’s approach is much more calculated than one might expect. He’s aware that there is a delicate balance between the world of chillwave and pop music, yet he’s sure that for every fan he may lose with his new, poppier approach, any fans he gains will soon be treated to something much less accessible. “It’d be fun to bring in a much wider audience, and then introduce them to some more obscure music,” he says. “I’m quite sure the next record won’t be as accessible and poppy.”
For the time being, the strong, polished production of Anything In Return will be rubbing shoulders with some of the pop world’s heavyweights. But only until Bundick makes his next move. “I hope my songs are strong enough regardless of production, but I definitely wanted to try different things with the production of this record. I’m always very uncomfortable to an extent when it comes to songwriting, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. In a way I was confident, but I wasn’t sure people would necessarily understand what I was trying to do – or if they ever will.”
BY JOSHUA KLOKE
