I'm Hopelessly Addicted to Sharp Pins' "Radio DDR"

And it's making me feel nostalgic for how music discovery used to be

Everyone who takes a serious interest in new music will be familiar with the Sisyphean task of keeping up to date with the torrent of releases. Even pretending to be on top of things is exhausting. Music is vast, boundless, impossible.

My good friend Gabbie recently compared this futile quest to collecting Pokémon cards. And have have you seen how many cash grabs expansions they keep releasing?

In the last month alone, my quest to catch ‘em all has been thwarted by a family holiday, a bout of food poisoning, the cobbled classics season, and the general sense of malaise that comes with being a Sheffield United season ticket holder.

But in the last two weeks, the greatest barrier to discovering new music has been new music itself — specifically Radio DDR by Sharp Pins. I simply can’t stop playing this record and it’s making me nostalgic for how I used to pause to savour new releases rather than just race on to the next one.

Have I possibly been doing this wrong?

When I started properly getting into music at the fag end of the Britpop era, this was the norm. Scrape together enough money to buy an album (on CD, obviously), agonise over the choice, hand over the cash, and play it to death for the next couple of weeks. Sometimes that was a gigantic waste of time — how much of my prime did I waste on the fucking Bluetones? — and sometimes it was pure bliss.

This is the precise reason I’ve got a stack of worn-out CDs stashed under the guest room bed. It’s why I was able to listen to The Stone Roses, Loveless, OK Computer, and The Soft Bulletin hundreds of times. I clearly had a lot of spare time on my hands in the late 1990s, but I only regret wasting so much of it on the first of that quartet.

In contrast, there are only two albums I’ve dwelled on to anywhere near the same extent in the 2020s — Alvvays’ Blue Rev and Jessica Pratt’s Here in the Pitch— and even then we’re talking no more than 30 full listens apiece. Still technically an infatuation, but not quite a restraining order level of obsession.

The way things are heading, Kai Slater’s intoxicating fusion of spiky jangle, classic British Invasion chord progressions, and 90’s lo-fi indie rock on Radio DDR may well surpass that figure. I am well and truly hooked.

While I’m hearing artists as diverse as Guided By Voices, Sufjan Stevens, Supergrass, The Nerves, and The Byrds, my overriding thoughts are “How talented is this kid?” and “Why does no one else write bridges like Kai Slater writes bridges these days?” (seriously, listen to “Lorelai” from 1:04 onwards, it’s stunning).

It would be so easy to hear Radio DDR’s production and prematurely dismiss it as a flawed bedroom project. Look beyond the hiss, however, and you’ll find a set of exceptionally well-written songs, defined by moments of jaw-dropping beauty (the arrangement in “You Don’t Live Here Anymore” springs to mind). Of course, regular readers will know that I prize spontaneity and spirit over perfection and superficial prettiness, which I guess is just a fancy way of saying that Bee Thousand is one of my favourite records of all time. Radio DDR feels similar in tone and potency, radiating an eerie magic that always seems faintly out of reach. It’s irresistible.

At some point, I’ll have to move on.

There are more records to appraise, reviews to write, and recommendations to make, but right now I’m happy to bask in the meandering loveliness of “Sycophant” or revel in the sneering fuzz of “When You Know”.

And maybe, just maybe, I need to ease off the gas on this musical journey and enjoy the scenery every once in a while.

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