Earlier this year CLASH caught sight of an unusual moniker. urika’s bedroom felt less like a place, and more like a memory. It’s not a location per se, but a floating point in our emotional lives. Patched through to the LA-based songwriter over Zoom, we find him outside his apartment – the lush, blue West Coast sky above as he chain smokes, deliberating over every single word.

Spending his formative years in Michigan, he came to Los Angeles partly out of familial commitment – he was following his older brother – and partly to pursue music. Quickly finding his tribe in the city’s labyrinthine DIY networks, he hooked up a number of gigs, playing in the live set-up for Youth Lagoon, for example, or jamming with friends. Thrust in front of an audience, the experiences unlocked something deep inside him.

—

—

I had been trying to find my voice before,” he reflects. “Now, I’m making music that would have really excited the younger version of myself.” When these side hustles came to a natural end, he found himself with time to kill, and a project to focus on. Utilising the tangible thrill of live performance, he developed a symbiotic relationship between his late-night home studio sketches and a desire for the stage. Tapping into some formative records from his adolescence, urika’s bedroom zeroed in on a Venn diagram that encompasses left-field hip-hop, indie rock, and vapourised melodic aspects.

Citing Tricky and UNKLE as influences, he combines those trip-hop forebears with the patchwork artistry of Gorillaz’ ‘Demon Days’. “I was after a certain feeling, but I wanted to avoid it becoming nostalgic. There’s a certain emotion from when those records came out that I feel now. There’s this urgency or rawness that really appeals to me.”

—

—

Aptly released in Autumn, his debut album ‘Big Smile, Black Mire’ is fascinating – a heady, atmospheric song cycle, it displays a unique aptitude for world-building. Take lead single ‘Circle Games’ with its crunching, Massive Attack drums, or live favourite ‘Ecstasy’ – each song conjures its own cosmos. One through-thread is the trusty, ever-present guitar, with urika’s bedroom extracting some wild six-string noises. “This is kind of like my guitar album, in a weird way. I’m sitting down, trying to play guitar on each song,” he says. 

The process, as he freely admits, has been revelatory. “It’s been cathartic, but also, I’m excavating,” he continues. “Having to turn over a lot of stones and really self-examine. It’s an exercise in honesty and emotion. Music can be anybody’s secret box. All the emotions you might not feel comfortable expressing, it creates a space for the character you want to be. You can imagine yourself in some kind of way, and somehow you become closer to being that thing.”

Walking outside his apartment, urika’s bedroom spit-balls about his influences: he’s drawn to visual art, and works intensely on his visuals, but also cites Martha Graham’s dance work, and the architecture firm Ensemble Studios as pivotal in unshackling him from his own preconceptions. “Everything starts from a seed that I’ve planted,” he explains. “This is what my emotional arc feels like in real-time.”

—

—

Using music as a means to gain emotional perspective, urika’s bedroom has finally gained focus. Instead of leaning on the positive, or being drawn towards the negative, he’s able to view both of those, in a full 360 panorama. “This is kind of like my selfie in front of a burning building,” he says, with a wry smile. “It’s expressing a certain duality. It’s like how Instagram feels. Life is not totally great, but it’s not totally awful. There’s a lot of dark shit in our everyday existence, but at the same time I’m finding some form of joy or just trivial fun. It’s the duality of emotional states.”

Right now, he’s in his “research and development phase”, extending his live show and sketching out new ideas. With hype settling on his debut album, urika’s bedroom is careful not to be distracted. It’s easy to make something ‘cool’ he points out, but it’s harder to genuinely move people. “It’s important to be vulnerable,” he finishes. “Everything I do has to have human value to it.”

—

—