Stream: BOYO, ‘Special’

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BOYO (Photo by Patrick Jewett)

Lo-fi, psych-pop free spirit Robert Tilden released two BOYO albums in 2020, then, as the fog of COVID-19 appeared to lift last year, followed up with a couple of singles that seemed ripped from the pages of early-Aughts indie-rock.

Beyond the releases, though, the singer-songwriter reached the nadir of his pandemic. A relationship ended, leading to his writing an album described as “full of depressing, meditative emo songs” that he planned to release this spring. But Tilden’s mood brightened during a November-December tour with Luna Luna, so he scrapped that album and quickly recorded another one. That record, “Echoes Like Memories” (BOYO’s six full-length), will be out Friday via Park the Van.

The closing track, “Special,” was released today as a single — it’s a frisky, funky romp that turns his bummer mood (“Every day with your head on your pillow”) inside out. “I wrote ‘Special’ after my mom played me Lionel Richie and the Commodores and Prince on a drive when I was an early teen,” Tilden says. “It was always floating around in my head but never found the right home until I got better at recording and sat down to make what became these new songs. I wanted it to sound like a song Daft Punk would sample and make way crazier.”

Since things are never not interesting with BOYO, the making of the album is worth noting. It was made in his basement studio with his live bandmate Hudson Buckley over a three-week period, during which Tilden battled insomnia, suffered kidney stones because of dehydration and tested positive for COVID-19 — a result that proved to be false, owing to a faulty home test.

||| Stream: “Special”

||| Also: Check out the 2021 singles “Escape Plan” and “We Never Turn Our Lights Off”

||| Live: BOYO opens SE SO NEON on April 10 at 1720. Tickets.

||| Previously: “Ghost Noise,” “Feel,” “Backseat Driver,” “Hit or Miss,” “Take Me Away” (feat. Dent May), “A Social Death by Proximity (in Los Feliz),” “Insomnia,” “Good As Gone”