Hey, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. Hope you're doing well. It's time for a review of this new Toro Y Moi album, Hole Erth.

Toro Y Moi, the musical pseudonym of producer, songwriter, singer, multi-instrumentalist, long-time underground music veteran, Chaz Bear. This guy has been dropping records and evolving his artistic craft consistently since the late 2000s, when he was framed as a key pioneer of what was labeled as chillwave music, which was really more of a very trendy hype label that music fans and journalists threw on to somewhat similar assembly of sounds happening at the time, as opposed to a very formal, conscious movement of art and music.

How silly that label was became instantly clear when all of the various artists who were pinned into this wave, as it were, began to fall off creatively or make desperate attempts at recreating that original success or hype. Then in the case of Chaz, you have him basically diverging from that sound entirely and then diverging from his next sound and his next sound and his next sound for more than 10 years on, pretty much making him one of the most difficult to pigeonhole artists to ever come out of the underground in the modern era.

This has made Toro Y Moi's catalog a bit of a difficult one to explore, as again, Chaz is always on something different, be it synth funk or disco or electropop, neo-psychedelic music, too, or something even jazz-adjacent. Yeah, he's really touched down on a lot of sounds over the course of his catalog, and he is doing that yet again on this new one over here.

What is he doing, you may ask? Something quite trendy, in fact, which doing anything that is in vogue isn't necessarily Chaz's usual bag. I think the closest he's ever come to doing that are maybe through a handful of collaborations and crossovers he's done over the years. And also for a time in his catalog, he was flirting a bit with doing like some alternative RnB stuff.

But on this new record over here, I think he is shooting for the stars in an even bigger way, and he's really doing some emo trap on this album. Yes, honest to God, Chaz seems to just have his ear to the ground when it comes to this recent wave of emo-type vocals and lyrics over trap instrumentals, trap beats, maybe with some the emo-type guitars in the mix there.

Yeah, and he's recreating this vibe in a way that seems pretty accurate to a sound that should catch the ears of hardcore fans of, I don't know, Juice WRLD and stuff like that. I mean, of all the things for Chaz to try to recreate or embrace, this is a surprising option. And as a result, I feel like this record is almost like a weird social experiment in some ways, because in one breath, I really do admire Chaz's ambition and the hopes he obviously put into this album. It seems like he's really trying as a student of music, as a music fan, as a music producer, to really inject some really authentic esthetics and musical ideas that seem like true to that original emo spirit I mean, there's even a track on here featuring Ben Gibbard of Death Cap for Cutie, for Christ's sakes.

But yeah, Chaz is really creating something here that under favorable circumstances should appeal to exactly that crowd. However, part of me thinks and wonders, is this actually how popular music is consumed and disseminated in this day and age. Is there an opportunity for Chaz to essentially step up here and say, Hey, I make this sound, too, and will you listen to me do it? When there's already, like provably a flood of exactly this thing out there already on the music market today. And then on top of that, you have Chaz's usual core audience, which is typically pretty open minded, considering how much he switches up from record to record. However, with the more indie type background many of them come from, is an emo trap album from Chaz, from anyone, really what they want to hear?

So regardless of how good this album is or isn't, I do have to wonder where exactly does the audience for this album lie? Does it exist at all?

However, I will say there were a handful of tracks where Chaz in chasing after this style did drum up some strokes of genius. And then there were others where I think he very accurately recaptures a certain style that obviously is outside of his normal wheelhouse. He does it accurately, but maybe he doesn't necessarily put his own exciting spin on it. Kind of like the opening track on the album, which in my opinion, sounds like a NAV song if it were actually more emotive. I mean, you've got the trap beat, you've got the washed out synths, you've got the manipulated lead vocals, you've got the flows. All the essential elements are there, and Chaz has done a bang-up job of mimicking them in a way to where it sounds like, yeah, this could be a track that your favorite auto crooner drops onto the rap caviar playlist.

To make it even clearer what exactly Chaz is going for here deeper into the record, we also have the song "Madonna" featuring Don Toliver, which as far as this psych trap direction goes, again, he recaptures this sound and vibe very accurately. But I wouldn't say this is a track that exactly stands out in this lane.

And diving further into this sound from here. We have moments like "Off Road" that while on one level, I think Chaz does mean well, simultaneously, the performance and vocals on this track are very awkward and the autotune is grating. And for the most part, this song just feels like Chaz is just doing a bad impression of something that he clearly doesn't have the tightest grasp of. I mean, tight enough to come up with some impressive tracks for sure, but this record can be a little hit or miss.

As far as the hits are concerned, though, we have tracks like "Baby Daddy", where he is going all in on this psych trap sound that is very Travis Scott-esque. The production is killer, the flows and vocals are killer, and Chaz goes the extra mile to pack in a lyrical narrative about a stripper who's just trying to make it on her own. With him telling all this from his perspective as an onlooker at the strip club, he out-wrote basically any random autocrooner's best stripper anthem.

So yeah, sometimes Chaz really does nail this style, but I feel like some of the album's best tracks are when he is experimenting with this whole emo and trap fusion thing a bit more and making it work more to his advantage. Like in the case of "CD-R", where, again, you do have these very low-key trap beats, these quirky and jumpy synthesizer runs. Then over that, Chaz tells a really interesting story about how essentially he started out in music and the way he struggled financially and personally to get his work out there.

Meanwhile, "Tuesday" is more of a pop punk, indie rap fusion, and it's a total anthem with some soaring vocals, where Chaz explains his hatred of repetition, not just with how mundane everyday life is and the news cycle, but it's pretty clear that he's throwing this out there to make it clear that he doesn't like to make the same album over and over and over, and he likes to switch things up. His passion as he's singing and writing about this hatred is palpable.

There's also "Hollywood" featuring Ben Gibbard, who I mentioned earlier, which I think has one of the strongest choruses on the entire record. The track is low key, features some chill beats in the background, and some very mournful, plucky, almost slowcore-esque guitars. Again, I think it's really refreshing to have somebody dabbling in this style, but with an actual rubric for emo music and indie music and underground music that they could fuse into it to bring this sound just a bit more depth and just something to be intrigued about. I would rather listen to that than somebody just copy Juice WRLD for the millionth time.

Beyond this, I will say I feel like the first half of this record is a lot stronger than the second, where I think Chaz starts painting himself into a corner, displaying the fact that he's having a hard time making a consistent album at a moving in this direction. You have some convoluted song structures as well, like on "Rosetta" as well as "Heaven", both of which could have had a lot more punch to them.

"Smoke" featuring Kenny Mason definitely stands out due to its very cheeky and hilarious lyrics. Like, "burning through this bread like a brand new toaster"? Oh, my God.

The closing track doesn't exactly tie things off in a big and exciting way either. In fact, the dance beats that back that song up feel almost out of place. But with that being said, clearly this record was Chaz being a bit restless creatively and just really taking a shot in the dark with a genre that most likely a lot of his audience is just not that into. And yet, he really dove into it anyway, and in my opinion, created some decent bangers in the process, even if those songs are going to go vastly underappreciated by audiences of people who just aren't into this type of music or are into this type of music, but maybe aren't willing to give somebody they haven't heard of a shot.

Look, admittedly, I myself feel like this is a deeply flawed album with nearly as many lows as there are highs. But with that being said, it was an interesting record all the same to listen to and dissect and sift through because Chaz really is a one of a kind songwriter and producer who, when he puts his mind to it, can do and try and attempt just about anything.

I'm feeling a light to decent six on this one.

Anthony Fantano. Toro Y Moi. Forever.