En concert à la [PIAS] Nites, le 16 décembre à la Flèche d'Or

When you first hear the name Royce Wood Junior, you half expect to see a character like Morris Day from The Time roll up in a Lincoln Town Car. His hair would be slicked back and he’d be wearing a pinstripe suit with wide lapels and shiny white loafers. He’d definitely have a moustache.

For the rising London musician in question, though, things are often far simpler than they seem. “I couldn’t invent a persona if I tried,” he laughs – his real name, Jim Wood, only the faint hint of facial fuzz on his top lip. The fancy sounding Royce, it turns out, is just his middle name and his dad’s Christian name; the ‘Junior’, added because “it made me sound like a New Orleans sax player, or something. I could segue into jazz quite easily with that name later on.”

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For now, Royce Wood Junior (or RWJ) is making the kind of music that could have been from a rival band in Prince’s Purple Rain film, if it had been made in 2015 and not 1984. He appeared to spring out of nowhere with his last year’s warped R&B track ‘Nuff’, but he’s been working behind the scenes and subtly helping to sculpt the future sound of British pop for some time.

To start, he co-produced many of the tracks on Jamie Woon’s dubstep-tinged, swooning soul debut album, 2011’s Mirrorwriting. More recently, though, he’s produced and done remix work for some of this year’s hotly tipped British artists, including BBC Sound Of 2015 poll topping singer Kwabs, and R&B/soul ingénues Rosie Lowe and Denai Moore. Ever diverse, he’s also the sole producer on Ninja Tune-signed electro-folkster Jono McCleery’s new record.

RWJ’s two previous solo EPs, 2014’s Rover and Tonight Matthew, set blogs stirring as to who exactly this new talent was. But his startlingly accomplished debut The Ashen Tang makes an unmistakable mark – this is a rare breed of studio magician, songwriter and solo artist. The album is masterfully pieced together with earworming hooks, funk flourishes, hat tips to the LA beat scene, moonlit soul and nourish shades of R&B, underpinned by RWJ distinctive, understated, bluesy voice. His are twisted pop songs for indigo-hued evenings and dim twilights, for being alone at midnight, and for people who didn’t believe that singer-songwriters would ever be credible again.

“I’ve always been a much better songwriter than a singer, so it’s nerve-racking, standing there, soul-baring in front of an audience,” he says matter-of-factly about how he feels about ‘doing a Kanye’. Nonetheless, it’s something he’s been working towards since 2011. Back then he was the touring guitarist with his friend Jamie Woon’s band, whom he played with for five years. He’d perform on stage with the band and then burn the midnight oil back in the hotel room, making his own music on his laptop.

“I was writing constantly and not having much of an outlet for it, so I decided to do my own project,” he says. “I don’t have any aspirations to be a rock’n’roll star; I just wanted to get my songwriting heard.” He’s remained close with Woon, too – he appears as the mysterious Michael Macwoonald on the woozy duet ‘Jodie’, their voices pitched down low amid blurts of neon synths and a clickety tangle of hip-hop beats and scratching. It’s exactly the kind of gauzy funk track you can imagine them cooking up during an all-night jam session when they used to live together in London.

The Ashen Tang is a full of moments like these; sounds that feel familiar and tap into your nostalgia nodes but that are spiked with RWJ’s uniquely wonky flavour. “There aren’t many people these days who do actual songwriting with chord changes and harmonies and a bit of stink,” he says, referring to his heroes like Prince and Stevie Wonder, who certainly did have the ‘stink’ he speaks of. And it’s not just the level of songcraft: RWJ wants to change the perception of the unassuming crooner, too. “If you’re a singer-songwriter you’re expected to be standing there with a leather jacket and an acoustic guitar,” he continues. “But why can’t you just fuck with that and do it differently?”

Turns out, Royce Wood Junior likes to fuck with it. A lot. Key to this is how he manages to navigate the murky grey waters between catchy pop songs and innovative production; he takes a well-written song and he wonks it up. On standout track ‘Midas Palm’, for example, a stunning ode to not realising what you have, RWJ offsets beautiful acoustic guitar picking and smoky reflections on lost love with the squashed sound of a digital tuba. Want stink? The song ‘Honeydripper’ lives up to its name; his voice drips with molten lust, its treacly funk exaggerated by a sticky drum stomp and squelchy, metallic fretwork.

‘Twiggin’’, meanwhile, sounds like Flying Lotus’s attempt to make a track for D’Angelo. ‘Remembrance Part I’ and ‘Part II’ have hints of shuffling Blawan-inspired techno and garage, overlain with arpeggiated, Prince-like vocals (the lyrics of which are taken from the poem Remembrance by Sir Thomas Wyatt). Songs like ‘Stand’ change the tone completely, however, and sees RWJ at his most Rufus Wainwright. Tense strings soar over a dramatic, rippling piano melody, building to an epic chorus – the kind you imagine should be sung in front of a red velvet curtain, with a grand piano, filling a vast concert hall.

The Ashen Tang isn’t just about broad production tastes, however; for Royce Wood Junior, the title has a deeper meaning, too. “It’s the bittersweet taste you walk around with in your mouth at all times,” he explains of his album title, smoothing down his silver-flecked quiff. “It’s what being a human is. My experience of being alive is that it’s never always great, and it’s never always completely terrible; you have this mixed bag of feelings all the time. That’s what ashen tanginess is to me.” Consequently, the album is full of piercing observations and hard-hitting lines. "True love makes no sound," he croons on ‘Midas Palm’; "if true love waits, it’s sordid afterwards," on ‘Stand’.

Unlike a lot of modern soul, though, his songs don’t linger on the schmaltzy stuff – “there are far too many love songs, and that’s not all that life, is it?” he notes. Rather, they have more 3D feelings. Take the jaunty, piano-led, Stevie-channeling song ‘Clanky Love’: it’s actually “an optimistic song about death”. ‘Nuther Bruther’ is “just about being a dickhead and letting all your mates down.” And the album’s gorgeously upbeat lead single, ‘Midnight’ – which sounds as if he had cut his teeth in Minneapolis nightclubs in the early 80s – is about how tomorrow is a new day.

Peel back the tightly woven layers of his electronic tapestries, though, and it’s clear that Royce Wood Junior is striving to write music that stays with you beyond one click on a Soundcloud stream. “I can’t remember the last time I heard like a new classic song, can you?” he says. “Today, it’s become okay to just steal stuff. It’s like a Nova with a red door a blue roof that’s just been nicked from ’round the corner – that’s what a modern pop song is to me. So in the face of a total lack of originality, what are you supposed to do as a recording artist? Other than try some crazy shit?” It really is as simple as that.