Premiere: CLANS, ‘Trouble (The boy who cried, I am a wolf)’
Kevin Bronson on
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Niko Monjarez knows trouble, and he is it. “If you knew I was trouble / why would you let me in?,” he frets to his lover in “Trouble (The boy who cried, I am a wolf),” his new song under the name CLANS.
It’s the latest from the singer-songwriter-producer whose early work — his “Lust” EP, released earlier this year, and a handful of singles — has shifted styles as easily as he changed addresses before he settled in L.A. Reared in a religious family in Detroit, Monjarez first started performing in Boston. Twice before he was 21, he criss-crossed United States, once hitchhiking and once in a van, and those travels and the people he met along the way inform his music.
CLANS first gained attention for the single “Alibi,” which saw him playing one-man doo-wop group. His other work has spanned gauzy electronic pop and folk. “Trouble,” self-recorded after hours in the artist’s work studio at his day job, carves out a sorrowful space between warm acoustic guitar and sighing atmospherics — the intimacy that is the common thread in CLANS’ music so far. “I bet you knew / how this would end,” he sings with palpable ache. As pillow talk goes, that’s about as real as it gets.
The new single is out this week.
||| Stream: “Trouble”
||| Also: Watch director Sean Wehrli’s video for “Glendale”
||| Also: Stream “Ride”
Grateful for the premiere Buzzbands!