Johan Lenox approaches pop music with the curiosity and perspective of a true outsider. Trained in classical music through his teens and into his twenties, he makes music on an epic scale with instruments that are centuries old; he writes orchestral arrangements and then manipulates those sounds digitally to create something uncanny that’s undeniably pop. His debut album WDYWTBWYGU is animated by skeptical nostalgia for growing up in some un-idyllic suburb, while simultaneously staring down an uncertain future. It’s a fully realized announcement of a new talent, an artist who isn’t reaching for pop-punk or some other bygone sound to articulate generational angst but blazing a different path altogether. His songs are stately and hyper contemporary, as likely to deploy sweeping woodwinds and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus as they are trap drum programming. “What I admire about pop music is that you can’t fake it,” Lenox says. “Millions of people have to like the song as a song for it to be a hit.” Lenox isn’t faking a thing.
