Hole Erth with Toro y Moi

MUSIC

Sep 8

Written By Simone Taylor

Since he started making music as Toro y Moi in 2009, Chaz Bear has developed a reputation as something of a sonic chameleon. The 37-year-old’s discography reads less like an artist description and more like an ingredients list of genres: hip-hop, chillwave 90s dance, boogie, RnB, disco, house, psychedelia, even sample-less instrumentals — just to name a few. And now, at this stage maybe unsurprisingly, Bear’s latest project Hole Erth is none of the above.

Instead, Hole Erth is a parallel time warp. Bear dives into the archives of 2000s pop-punk alongside contemporary trap, placing the sounds of Blink-182 and Saves the Day side by side with that of Travis Scott and Lil Yachty. As he melds the two seemingly disparate genres, he draws on their shared misfit history and feeling of juvenile rebelliousness. There’s satisfying irony in that the project Bear has released at his oldest is the one that most strongly evokes a sense of youth.

“I wanted to channel this angst I had as a teen where you had some sort of ‘anti’ feeling, but don’t know what it is yet,” Bear tells Astrophe. “Especially as you get older, you have to hold onto that edge.”

Throughout the project, Bear weaves psychedelic-trap production and adlibs with punk distortion and reverb-fuelled, anthemic vocals. In ‘Undercurrent’, Porches’ melancholy guitar riff is met with Don Toliver’s signature autotune; whilst in ‘Smoke’, 808s and a verse rapped by Kenny Mason takes over what began as an acoustic guitar ballad. The album’s feature list includes millennial indie alumni Benjamin Gibbard as much as it does 19-year-old hyperpop artist glaive.

The result is something of a split timeline — both in reference to the dominant music culture of youth in the 2000s versus now; as well as Bear’s own personal, nostalgic reflections from a perspective of maturity. “I used to sing like this back a lot in high school, that louder indie rock sort of stuff,” Bear says. “I wanted to try find that Chaz with who I am now and weld all these personalities together.”

Against Hole Erth’s contemporary themes and technological maximalism, he unexpectedly injects an aesthetic tendency towards the natural. Bear explains this with reference to the project’s title, itself a reference to ‘Whole Earth’, a DIY catalogue from the ‘70s that provided guides for self-sustaining ways of living.

“I wanted to revive it in a way, in the sense that it’s a lifestyle worth paying attention to. The internet has helped blur access points for different cultures and it’s fun to find your tribe but it also comes down to what you can find in reality,” he says. “So that’s why I wanted to draw it to the whole earth, and have this album still be rooted in a grounded space.” Even in this, Bear preserves Hole Erth’s rebellious ethos through punky cover art and wordplay whose missing letters completely subvert the meaning of ‘whole’.

Whilst the album mostly explores the idea of youth through a lens of teenage angst and misunderstanding, Bear’s approach to music itself is youthful in the opposite sense. He’s easygoing, optimistic, and somehow unjaded. “I don’t feel like I’m close to 40 but I am,” he tells Astrophe. When he says, “I feel like I’m just starting to find my groove,” it’s an incredible statement given his career measuring 13 years and eight albums.

“With each cycle, the audience gets bigger. So I’m just trying to wrap my head around it and figure out how to have a good time with it all,” Bear muses. “Music is still providing and I’m very thankful. I didn’t want much from music other than for people to enjoy it.”