Until recently, most people knew Adam McIlwee for his work with Tigers Jaw, but since leaving the band in 2013 he has been channelling all his signature vocal drawls and emotionally-charged lyrics into a project called Wicca Phase Springs Eternal. We’ve premiered a few of his releases over the past year, which have tended to skew towards dark, bombastic club music – a mix of Morrissey and Chief Keef, as it’s been described.
McIlwee has always pushed forward and put a firm stamp on everything he does, but with his latest release, Secret Boy, which we’re premiering below, McIlwee has really honed in on the middle ground between his beginnings as a guitar-based songwriter and his newly conquered territory working with producers. As was the case with “Shut My Eyes”, an acoustic trap triumph released last year, Wicca Phase excells most when those two words come together. Fucking with samples from The Cure’s “Lullaby” and Blink-182’s “Stockholm Syndrome” (among loads more, probably), laying down the same hard-hitting structures and vocal melodies that made McIlwee’s work with Tigers Jaw so loveable, Secret Boy blends two very different crafts more seamlessly than he has ever done before.
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Listen below.
