Raised by the Internet
The roots of Lovejoy run deeper than just one twitch streamer.
In the world of pop culture, you seldom hear of the music industry ever colliding with the gaming industry. By today’s standards, social media influencers who base their channels around the category of video games don’t get much more exposure than the amount they already receive, and social media algorithms make the audience they are exposed to very specific. To most people, the idea you can play video games as a career is a joke. When they see an influencer, they immediately assume that the person on the screen is lazy, unmotivated, living in their parents’ basements and doing nothing with their lives. It is an extremely common misconception, but it makes career options outside of the influencer life limited and very hard. Either you indulge in this subsection of the world, or you shun it completely. And the wall that this creates between two groups is not an easy one to scale.
There are a few who have managed to go beyond the realm of social media however, and as the generation of internet kids grows, so does the norm of these “breakout influencers.” Chances are, you have heard of at least one of them: MrBeast, Logan Paul, Charli D’Amelio… The list goes on. But down the list, a little less well-known, stands a small indie band based out of Brighton that has made a name for itself within the genre of indie rock: Lovejoy.
Lovejoy’s rise to fame can be traced back to the band’s lead singer, Will Gold, also known as Wilbur Soot online. The Briton has amassed 6.34 million subscribers on YouTube and 4.6 million on twitch, which gave Lovejoy a good boost when it was first formed. Prior to Lovejoy, Wilbur had written many songs on his own, some of which caused some controversy in his early days of social media. These songs were often satirical and made fun of internet stereotypes — a socially awkward and desperate man just divorced from his wife, an eccentric and overly-horny e-boy, the “Nice Guy” who is, in the truest sense, just a hypocrite. Wilbur’s songs had a very specific style, one that matched the energy levels of Bo Burnham, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and Axis of Awesome. They reflected Wilbur’s personality and sense of humor.
At some point in 2020, Lovejoy was formed — however Wilbur didn’t disclose any details about the band at that time and explained why in a Twitch stream in September.
“I specifically don’t want to reveal stuff about my band until later on. Cuz I don’t want us to grow based on the fact that people know who I am, you know?”
Come February, he announced that the band had finalized six songs that they felt were finished. And on May 9th, 2021, the band’s very first album was released onto YouTube, called Are You Alright?
But Are You Alright? was nothing like anything Wilbur had ever written — No satirical meanings, no poking and prodding at internet stereotypes and desperate single men. The album had a completely different feel compared to Wilbur’s other songs. From the lyrics to the instrumentals, one thing was clear: Lovejoy wasn’t making songs for YouTube to laugh to, they were making songs appropriate for the whole world to hear. They were reviving a genre and musical style from the 2000s that had died out long ago. This was (and still is) the essence of Lovejoy. The band made it perfectly clear through their music that Lovejoy and Wilbur Soot were two very different artists with very different intentions.
Within 24 hours of release, the music videos of One Day and Taunt both hit 1 million views on YouTube, as well as reaching #1 on US iTunes on May 11th. They were huge hits, in and out of their communities, and it grounded themselves in as the new guys on the block. The world of indie rock had just gotten one band bigger.
Digging A Little Deeper.
As interesting as Lovejoy’s rise is however, more interesting is the inspiration and creative processes behind each song they wrote — If you look up ‘Lovejoy behind the scenes’ on YouTube, all sorts of videos come up that talk about Lovejoy’s inspirations and writing processes. Wilbur has told his audience many times that when writing songs, they try to go for an ‘industrial’ feel. Interpol and Los Campesinos seem to be two of the band’s big inspirations.
“I’ve been listening to a lot of emo music lately. So what I’ve ended up doing is writing indie rock songs with really emo lyrics. So its like… think Two Door Cinema Club, but the lead singer wants to like… cry all day. With a little bit of Arctic Monkeys in there too, except Alex Turner isn’t singing about ‘Stop making the eyes at me’ and instead he’s going… “I’m so alone :’).”
The band even has playlists on their Spotify page, respectively entitled What We Were Listening to While Writing Are You Alright? and What We Were Listening to While Writing Pebble Brain. The Wombats, Good Kid, Two Door Cinema Club, Arctic Monkeys… If you do like Lovejoy, chances are you will love the rest of these artists just the same. Angry, distorted melodies overlap with grungy bass riffs, drumbeats that demand attention, and lots of 7th chords. Every one of those songs has a little bit of Lovejoy in it. There is rarely a time when your ears aren’t unoccupied by some sort of sound, and you find yourself subconsciously trying to dance to the rhythm.
Upon closer inspection though, one will find something very interesting that ties all these bands together, apart from Good Kid: first of all, nearly all of them are based in the UK — Cardiff, Bangor, Sheffield, Liverpool — and all of them were founded at the turn of the 21st Century, within ten years. Even more interesting is that most of the songs that Lovejoy drew their inspiration from were written no later than 2015, with the majority being written between 2002 and 2008. Any later than that, you stray into uncharted waters.
Listening to these songs, you are introduced to the world of indie rock as it once was. A style that was born and flourished at the turn of the 2000s, inspired by emo culture, metal music, skater kids, and VCR tapes with fisheye lenses. And since that time, the genre hasn’t been the same — Most Wombats songs today sound more like a softer, more modern fusion of pop and rock, and same goes for Arctic Monkeys and Two Door Cinema Club. Over time, the guitar distortion and angry fast-paced chord progressions that truly defined the pinnacle of indie rock rusted away, evolving into a more refined tone. It took on a gentler melody that could adapt to the pop genre better, making it more mainstream. It begs the question: why?
If you listen to the Wombats, listen to these two songs in order: ‘Kill the Director’, released 2007, and ‘Greek Tragedy,’ (not the Oliver Nelson remix) released 2015. Remember, both songs are made by the same people.
Compared to each other, Kill the Director seems to want to get its hands dirtier — The fast-paced, shouty tone is backed by a constant stream of vigorous drums and guitar. Greek Tragedy takes on a more mellow, more techno-esk vibe to it using a variety of Synth pads, digital keyboards, and vocal filters to create a more modern rhythm.
So here is something to think about — If someone had told you these songs were written by different artists, would you believe it? And even if you did, might someone else be able to recognize it right away?
Now this is no criticism to the Wombats — they are still an amazing group that has produced some quality music — but Greek Tragedy is their most popular song with 149 million plays on Spotify. Compare that to Kill the Director, which only has 83 million. So, when and how did this shift happen? And how come Lovejoy is looking back at it for inspiration?
Let’s think even further back an era — the age of teenage rebellion, MTV, the color black. When rock bands like Korn, Green Day, Nirvana, Blink-182, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and more were in their prime — This was the pinnacle of rock music as a genre, and arguably the birthplace of indie rock if indie rock’s older sibling role model skateboarded, wore black nail polish, and screamed a lot. At some point in time, the disco beats and classic rock tunes from the 80’s combined with a young, rule-breaking generation that only wore black to create the genres of rock, alternative, and metal. It was a time like no other, wild and free, and represented a new age of music. No matter when the genre of rock as a whole was born, its magnum opus existed there: At the turn of the millennium. And in the following years, it would crank out some of the world’s best music.
This is undoubtedly the era which Lovejoy draws its inspiration from, and if you compare Lovejoy to these indie rock bands from the 2000s, you can hear the Lovejoy in each of them — in the drums, in the guitar, in the base, in the rhythm and pacing. It’s all there.
Nowadays, indie rock simply isn’t what it used to be, whether or not it’s the artist’s ‘fault.’ It had become clear at some point that the rock scene was no longer where the money was. The world had shifted its eyes to pop and rap, preferring the synthetic beats over the unfiltered ones; and whether they knew it or not, many of these indie artists had begun to reshape themselves to try and fit into this mold. In doing so, they lost a lot of what made them unique as indie artists — The grittiness of the Wombats, the dirty energy of Arctic Monkeys — was thrown out and replaced with synth pads and mellow beats that stuck these artists somewhere between alternative and pop.
But that’s not to say that indie rock as a whole has disappeared — there are plenty of bands that still embody this style and execute it nicely. Wallows, Hippo Campus, Surf Curse, and Dayglow just to name a few. I like to think that the minds of these bands got stuck in a time loop in 1999, but their bodies kept aging. There is a history that exists in these songs, and Lovejoy is a living example of this history — they are bringing back an era that many people today were too young to enjoy then. The era of skater kids, home videos, rip jeans and staying up late. And especially in Lovejoy’s case, they are taking this culture and exposing it to a generation of teens who were just babies at the pinnacle of indie rock.
Maybe this exposure will rekindle a fire for the genre. As Wilbur’s audience only grows, the amount of exposure that people get to his content — and subsequently to the band — will grow. Until then, the band has just recently begun to go on tour, a big milestone for them in their musical career. Whatever is next up for Lovejoy no one truly knows. But we can safely say that they aren’t going away for a while.
