Joesef Is Making Sad-Beautiful Pop Without Hiding the Mess

Mar 11 2020 · 3min

Joesef already feels like the kind of artist people will spend a year pretending they discovered before everyone else. By March 2020, he had the Play Me Something Nice EP behind him from 2019 and spots on both the BBC Sound of 2020 longlist and NME’s essential new artist list.

What pulls me toward Joesef is that he understands a very specific emotional register: the point where vulnerability and self-destruction are standing a little too close together. Plenty of artists write breakup songs, yearning songs, lonely-night songs. Joesef’s material tends to feel more complicated than that. There is desire in it, but also guilt. Tenderness, but also repetition. You can hear someone trying to tell the truth while knowing they have not exactly behaved like a saint.

That kind of emotional ambiguity is catnip to me when it is done well, and here it mostly is. His voice has enough soul influence to give the songs warmth, but not so much that they tip into retro affectation. He is not cosplaying classicism. He is using familiar emotional language to say something current and a little less clean.

The current wave of sad pop can sometimes be painfully overlit. Every feeling is underlined, every wound is aestheticised, every lyric arrives with a pre-installed caption energy. Joesef is better than that because his songs sound as if they come from actual aftermath rather than from the idea of aftermath. There is shame in there sometimes. There is longing. There is softness. There is also a slightly destructive streak that keeps the music from becoming too polite.

I also think his instinct for melody is strong enough to carry him further than the average “promising songwriter” conversation tends to admit. These are not just diaristic sketches with decent production. He understands how to shape a chorus so that it feels inevitable rather than merely placed. That matters if he is going to move from early-critical-favourite status into something more lasting.

If I have a note of caution, it is that atmosphere alone will not be enough forever. Right now the blend of bruised intimacy and smooth soul-pop framing is working. Over time, he will need to keep widening the emotional and musical frame without losing the bruised specificity that makes him interesting in the first place. But that is a future problem, and frankly, it is the kind you want an artist to have.

For now, Joesef sounds like someone who knows that beauty and bad decisions often turn up in the same room. He does not glamorise that fact exactly, but he does not flinch from it either. That honesty gives the songs their charge.

There is something appealingly unvarnished about artists who let you hear the ache and the pattern at once. Joesef does. That is why he feels worth following now, before the story gets cleaner and the headlines get louder.

Sometimes the artists who last are the ones who know how to make damage sing without pretending it is noble. He may be one of them.