Bakar abandons the Hip-Hop night lights of nobody’s Home and opts for something a bit brighter as he ventures out on the road. Perhaps a little lost.

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OVERVIEW

Once a song picks up enough momentum to chart platinum and churn out its own TikTok sped up rendition, it’s never easy to stop pigeonholing an artist to one frame of mind. That’s what certainly happened with his 2019 London summer bop of Hell N Back that was featured on a-many rinsed material online. But when his debut of Nobody’s Home dropped in 2022, it presented us to a sound that was brooding and broiling hidden in the shadows from a vacant streetlight. A new sense of purpose, if you will. Now, his 2023 follow-up is the Camden singer-songwriter waking up and smelling the coffee, as he masks the darkness with the light.

Bakar’s style can be best described as a blur between the scrappy fragments of 2000’s Strokes indie-rock and left-field hip-hop. So you can’t be at least surprised when Halo does all of that and then some. Led by his proverbial lyricism and aching acoustics, Halo is as every bit bigger and brighter than his first.

<<Halo means self-love.>>

SONG-TO-SONG

The album starts off with OneInOneOut, a pulsating quip met with strong storytelling and an equally impressive cameo with none other than Little Simz starting the whole album off with Halo. Begin. A guitar shredding in a tin can propels us into Alive! – a first taste of Bakar’s new founding smell to indie rock and how hideously easy it is to make a catchy limerick. Facts_Situations dips into Bakar’s former side of off-colour nightime lo-fi, as the funky coffee house chords and resourceful lyrics notated straight from a conversation tuck you in. Largely recorded in a rented LA abode, Bakar remarks, “Still, I came back for you / Still, I run laps for you / An eye for an eye, ain’t gonna fix what you did to it / But I get it if you wanna fix, if it’s there still.” If Facts_Situations was the disastrous conversation the night before, All Night are most certainly the doozy after effects in the morning, another catchy ‘large than life’ jam. For once, we see Bakar here scrap the low fidelity jams and see him do some real storytelling under Selling Biscuits – “Me and my friends really used to be at festivals and doing what we needed to do to get by – selling biscuits to rich kids… It’s about having this moment where I realised, “Oh my god, they’re not different from us and we’re not different from them.”Add it to the list, it’s another swampy indie tale of getting by.

I’m Done is an elusive R&B tone before it cuts in with static Talking Heads-esque drums, another somewhat forgetful interlude before we’re brought into what seems like the one song that people will endeavour to get to as quick as possible. Matched with that same kenetic 2000’s scrappy indie rock of yesteryear, Right Here, for Now was one to get absolutely right. Hence why it was recorded at Electric Lady in New York. But rather throwing in a rather shapeshifting Hendrix solo that the halls have heard, it’s a Strokes thing with many of us imagining Julian himself singing it. Bakar loves it and so do we, but again – it’s nothing remarkably new. Invisible – the seventh song into the album – sees Bakar embraces growing up on electronic music and opts for something a little different. Of course, though his direction can’t drift too far and so we’re met again with the same seedy repetitiveness of those airless indie chords.

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The album has its moments of clarity as we see Bakar delve into a fuck it and see jamming decorum through an acclimatized indie-hip hop sound – but feels a little flat in places when those same sounds are pilfered throughout the 11 tracks. Seems that all the travelling on the road caused them to forget what he had written already. Still though, an equally enjoyable album if you are looking for some of those timeless indie rock melodies. You won’t find anything remarkably new here though.