DERBY’s debut album Slugger presents an interesting paradox: How can an album this derivative also feel authentic, even original? Single “Gold” seems like a slick attempt to recreate Dijon’s fast and free songwriting magic, his big-feeling bravado, his Americana-twanged R&B; “Jenny” draws clear inspiration from Alex G; his frequent use of pitch-shifted vocals and flanged guitars are siphoned from the Bible of Blonde. Yet DERBY—a Houston native who now lives in New York and whose real name is Craig Caldwell—has talent that continues to reveal itself even after you clock the comparisons and a perspective that cuts through the references. Slugger captures a world of quotidian intensity and rural nostalgia: shooting a deer through the eyes with a double-barrel shotgun, blasting the radio on a hundred-degree day, dancing in the kitchen with your sweetheart as rain pings the tin roof, watching TV together after an argument, wondering who’ll apologize first. These scenes feel fresh within DERBY’s off-kilter sonic palate, his quixotic romanticism shot through with a touch of dirty realism.
DERBY has been careful to keep his personal life, and image, out of the spotlight. The avatar for Slugger’s art and promotional materials is a deer; the few photos of him online are taken at twilight, his eyes and face shadowed by a camo hat. His only other release, 2021’s Hiraeth, has a few interesting moments but fails to produce a song worth listening to again. Although remaining mysterious has its advantages—most listeners will encounter DERBY with no context, expectation, or visual association—not establishing a unique persona may hinder an artist hoping to avoid the Dijon and Frank Ocean copycat tag. But in a hyper-commodified, identity-forward industry, it’s admirable for DERBY to eschew an elaborate public presence, to stand behind his art and allow the music to communicate whatever it will.
And his music, fortunately, needs no out-of-frame persona to work its wonders. His plug-in-warped indie pop bears traces of folk and rap, emo and outlaw country, R&B and hyperpop. Slugger’s songs are scaffolded by warbly guitars and dry drum kits, its melodies simple and arresting. DERBY’s voice is almost always pitched up and routed through plate reverb, phaser, and Auto-Tune, a form of masking that makes it easier to be excessively vulnerable in his writing. Opener “Deer in the Belly of the Snake” roils with analog hiss and aggressive pitch correction, which serve as the perfect cloaks for DERBY to sad rap some of his most cutting lines: “Sucks, suck it up/Sucker punch to the teeth/Teach you how to speak in his name/Show you how to act in his presence/Lessons burned into your brain.” Elsewhere he’s getting into fist fights and admitting he’s a bastard, shivering violently while begging his baby to come home. These scenes don’t come across as cloying or cheap in part because it’s all so startlingly sincere. DERBY’s searching far and wide for connection and forgiveness, hoping something somewhere can eradicate all that painful, inconsolable stuff inside him.
The best songs arrive as unique bursts of inspiration, limber expressions of DERBY’s genre-agnostic sensibilities. “Glow” layers pedal steel with jersey club percussion, DERBY’s sped-up singing floating over spacy guitar chords, while “Money Fight” feels plucked from a childhood memory, its emotional core urgent and disorienting, its climax building and sloping and stampeding toward irresolution. Slugger can lose its dream-like momentum when the ideas feel forced and over-considered, like on the Alex G-indebted “Jenny” or the sedated closer “Armored,” neither of which home in on their emotional potential. Still, Slugger is one of the most surprising indie pop records of the year, an album that understands something sacred about art-making: If you lay yourself as bare as possible, something special is almost certain to emerge.
