IMOGEN STAINES - 16 APR 2021

I would never tell anyone what to do. But today I make an exception: you must listen to Theo Gold’s debut album. Four years in the making, Jet Star is a thing of mesmerising sonic and visual beauty. It is spacey yet balanced, kaleidoscopic, manicured, reverberating, and as precious as its creator’s name suggests it should be.

Jet Star’s origins are beautifully humble, and this makes its final form all the more impressive. Auckland-based Theo Gold, real name Theophilus Hewlett, produced his instrumentals on a ‘cracked Logic Pro’ that his friend downloaded for him in New York. ‘I played everything through an Akai mini and recorded vocals through a Rode condenser,’ he tells me. It should feel contrived to call Theo Gold a musical alchemist. But when he tells you Jet Star’s story, it doesn’t.

Something of a musical magpie, he draws as much influence from ‘80s synth pop as he does from ‘10s trap. “OK OK”, the seventh track on the album, unmistakably evokes ‘00s Australian electropop. You can imagine it rubbing shoulders with tracks from Cut Copy and Van She on an ethereal electro playlist your friend’s cool older sister put together in 2008. “Satisfaction”, on the other hand, ‘is my version of a soppy Drake song,’ Theo says, noting that most of what he watches and listens to ends up making its way into his music in some form. Clearly attentive and discerning, Theo has produced stylistic cohesion without a hint of mess or chimerism in Jet Star. His sound is accessible from many different musical starting points, and there’s a serious magic to that. Put simply, it’s a blend - a very, very good one.

His vocals always begin as ‘a reaction to the instrumental’, and he builds lyrically from there, freestyling in the moment, then revising later. On Jet Star, he’s concerned with long distance love, existential unease, new love and transience. He weaves dexterously between the literal and the symbolic, making you swoon a little as you hard-core relate literally the whole way through.

Mastered by Zac Hornsby and visually interpreted by New York-based artist Hugo Christian Slane, Jet Star is gorgeous, fun and sophisticated. Safe to say I will have it on repeat for the foreseeable.

Stream the album below, and find Theo Gold on Instagram | Bandcamp | Spotify