Brooding singer/songwriters are just about everywhere we look and listen in the American underground at the moment, but while the market is flooded with a lot of interesting and provocative talent, it’s still easy to differentiate the legitimate gems from the stand-ins you’ll find on the left side of the dial just about anywhere on the indie circuit.
Nick Phoenix is a treasure of a rock n’ roll troubadour in the new single “Andromeda,” and despite not having listened to him before now, I can feel a sense of intimacy within his sound that seems familiar and refreshing to the ears. One of the first elements of Phoenix’s personality that caught my attention was his relative disinterest in rusticity and some of the more abjectly pastoral influences found in an emotionally charged Americana of 2022; his peers might be obsessed with these things, but “Andromeda” is devoid of such facets entirely. This isn’t a player who we need to worry about falling into synthetic dependencies when he steps into a recording space to work on an arrangement, or even something as simple as a hook, and were this not the case we wouldn’t have the slick release we’ve got in this all-new single.
It’s rather impossible to listen to “Andromeda” without picking up on the rock n’ roll undertow in the structure of the song, and once we reach the fever pitch of the track I think any allusions to epic, stadium-shaking grooves are now full-blown realizations. He might be going about it a different way than some of his closest contemporaries would, but Phoenix is nonetheless finding a way to work a bit of bravado into the big picture here, even if it means sacrificing a bit of efficiency to get us there.
I admire his courage on this end, especially seeing as the strength of so many pop songs is determined by an artist’s willingness to conform rather than experiment. Doing something trickier than the competition can handle takes serious guts, and as we listen to “Andromeda,” the track seems to get bigger and more connective as we push on. Indulgence is one way to phrase it, but to me, what we’ve got in this performance is a good example of what it sounds like when an artist really cuts and loose and gives us everything they’ve got, from stirring rhythm to infectious rhymes inside of a format that doesn’t feel prefabricated and plasticized.
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There’s even more live potential for Nick Phoenix than there are studio opportunities for the sound he’s rocking in “Andromeda,” but the great thing about where he’s at professionally right now is that there’s really nothing he can’t pursue when it comes down to it. It would be interesting to hear a raw acoustic version of this song in the future to give us a little compositional transparency, and to better highlight the melodic sting of the lead vocal Phoenix is dishing out in the second act here, but I’ll honestly be waiting on whatever he decides to release next.
Troy Johnstone