Great pop music of all varieties tends to be born on the back of a good vocal, which is exactly what has been getting people particularly excited about the music of Little Hurt this September. While a lot of artists are more than content to balance out an arrangement with indulgence here and efficiency there is a performer who has to focus on one angle at a time, producing a stacked, tonally present work in “Cooler If U Did” that is going to get a reaction out of you the first time you listen to it. There are some artists who need a little bit of time figuring themselves out in this game, and there are others like this one, who come ready to please with a sound that doesn’t need a lot of extra polish to be appealing.
The percussion is made to follow the delivery of Little Hurt rather than the other way around, and had this not been made the case I can’t say for sure whether or not the groove in “Cooler If U Did” would be as buxom as it is in this situation. One of the worst things I encounter in a lot of alternative rock and crossover pop music is a lack of moxie when it comes to putting something like a beat or even an implied harmony at the forefront of a mix, but this isn’t an artist who appears to be even a little bit intimidated by doing as much – if anything, he’s enjoying the bold and brooding places it’s taking us here.
SMART URL: https://orcd.co/cooler
These colorful melodies would have been enough to leave me really spellbound when listening to this track for the first time, but when they’re bound up with a voice like that of Little Hurt, we’re given access to a dam of emotionality that’s just waiting to come undone under the tension of the right setup. If he’s able to carry even a fraction of the charisma he has when playing in the studio over to the stage with him, this isn’t going to be a pop artist who we’re left guessing their name some ten years from now, but instead, a player who is able to influence as much as he creates.
I can tell that Little Hurt is just getting started in showing us who he is when he gets into the studio to make something smart and thoroughly immersive, and if there’s anything we can learn about his personality just from studying the likes of “Cooler If U Did,” it’s that the pop music model he’s interested in bending to his will has a lot more in common with the new school than anything in the old. This isn’t to say that he’s lacking in refined, classic influences, but more to state something anyone can pick up on when listening to “Cooler If U Did,” which is that the best of his work is still waiting for us in the future, along with his ticket into the mainstream fold.
Trace Whittaker
