Ode to Viceroy

There is something genuinely funny about the premise of this song — a sincerely felt ode to a cheap cigarette brand — but the music plays it completely straight, and that gap between subject and sincerity is exactly where the charm lives. The guitar tone is hazy and rolling, with a slight wooziness that mirrors the lightheaded drift of a smoke break. DeMarco's vocals are casual and half-murmured, as though he's thinking out loud rather than performing, and the melody has that easy-going, almost accidental quality that characterizes his best early work. The tempo is slow enough to feel genuinely unhurried. Beneath the surface humor, the song is also about a very specific kind of simple pleasure — the ritual satisfaction of something small and habitual that offers a brief pause from the forward momentum of the day. It fit perfectly into the lo-fi indie aesthetic of the early 2010s, where embracing the mundane with full sincerity was itself a kind of artistic statement. The production is warm and slightly rough, like a photograph taken on a disposable camera. This is a song for exactly the kind of moment it describes: standing outside somewhere, not particularly in a hurry, giving yourself over to a small sensory experience without needing it to mean more than it does.