Stream: Billy Uomo, ‘I Need You Now’

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Billy Uomo

Aaron Leigh has released six EPs as Billy Uomo, the solo project he debuted in 2017 after the members of pop charmers Babes went their separate ways.

Likes Babes’, Uomo’s music is sweet and subversive, the kind of stuff that might have you smiling through tears, not to mention being slightly gobsmacked at how deftly the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist can plumb various gradations of classic pop — doo-wop, jangle, dream, psychedelic, power, punk, etc.

Last week, Uomo announced that his debut album will be coming out via L.A.’s Lepel Records, home to Kario Salem’s supergroup KARIO. Uomo has titled the full-length “Nosotrosferatu,” a portmanteau of the Spanish word for “we” and “Nosferatu,” the 1922 German vampire movie.

“For a while I was on a reverse schedule where I was staying up all night and sleeping all day, and I felt like I’d become an almost vampiric person,” the songwriter says. “I was in a relationship at the time and it didn’t work out, and I came up with the name ‘Nosotrosferatu’ as a way of saying how together we created one singular fucked-up creature.”

The album’s first two singles, “I Need You Now” and “We’re Going to Die,” arrived Friday, the former seemingly exhumed from a slow dance at a 1960s prom and the latter from a psychedelics-inspired moment of truth that those dancers might have had a couple years later.

If, as Uomo says, it’s his intent to “[make] something sad that also feels like a weird little party,” he’s got it down to a science.

Uomo sings and plays guitar, bass, drums, keys and synth on the album. “I think about every little thing when I’m writing and recording, but at the same time I just try to let go and focus on what feels right,” he says. “You have to be sort of a lunatic to work like this, and all the songs on the album were challenging for me in their own way. But the whole experience taught me that I’m capable of creating something like this many more times. It showed me that I can keep making music exactly the way I want to.”

||| Stream: “I Need You Now” and “We’re Going to Die”