With joyful house beats and emotive production, producer Joe Thornalley’s latest EP offers a more approachable side of his sound.
In tarot, the flame-licked Tower card represents a mercurial period of upheaval and personal transformation. After producer and experimental artist Vegyn moved from London to Los Angeles last fall, the foreboding card became a regular appearance in his deck. The heavy symbolism seemed to fit. The producer born Joe Thornalley was battling depression and seeking to exorcise it by pushing his lopsided, woozy electronic music in uncomfortable directions—and the burning Tower suggested the process wouldn’t be easy. But though the cover of his new Like a Good Old Friend EP pays homage to the card, the music channels its volatile energy into a more approachable side of Vegyn’s sound, with joyful house beats and emotive production that gives way to some of his catchiest melodies yet.
Like a Good Old Friend has a clearer throughline than 2019’s glitchy Only Diamonds Cut Diamonds or the sprawling, 71-track Text While Driving If You Want to Meet God. The EP’s pensive works were born out of improvisation at the piano, an instrument that Vegyn picked up during quarantine. The strategy leads to winding songs that melt imperceptibly into different forms; on “Mushroom Abolitionist,” London artist Duval Timothy’s strings braid with Vegyn’s luminous keys for a searching, blissed-out highlight that cycles through uplifting moods. Timothy adds a similarly light touch to “Sometimes I Feel Like I’m Ruining Songs,” where snatches of conversations flit between a propulsive house beat and dancing keys. Together, the songs feel like processed nostalgia, served up with the same scratchy yearning as someone like Burial.
That sentimental impulse proves double-edged for Vegyn, who occasionally relies more on mood than melody. The cinematic title track ambles along a shuffling beat and keys until Owen Pallett quietly arrives with strings, but the song’s moving parts are too aimless to settle on anything memorable. The drifting, beatless “So Much Time - So Little Time” encounters a similar fate, with London artist John Glacier’s voice chopped up over introspective guitar noodling. It’s meditative, but the empty space renders it airless.
Like a Good Old Friend allows Vegyn to stretch his limbs and try a more wistful approach, which often suits his off-kilter stylings. His production choices are still unexpected and sharp, maintaining the self-assurance that’s turned him into a hotly tipped collaborator for artists like Frank Ocean, JPEGMAFIA, and Travis Scott. He’s at his best on “I See You Sometimes,” crunching East London rapper Jeshi’s shrugged-off rhymes through layers of distortion over a stuttering beat that sounds submerged in water. “I don’t know where I’m goin’ to/But I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Jeshi intones, incidentally giving voice to Vegyn’s free-wheeling methodology.
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