hey girl

Boy Pablo makes nervous music — not anxious exactly, but fizzing with the kind of energy that lives in your chest right before you say something you've been thinking about for weeks. "hey girl" captures that specific social electricity: jangly guitar strums tumbling over each other slightly too fast, a rhythm track that leans forward rather than sitting back, the whole thing feeling pleasantly handmade, like it was tracked in a bedroom with whatever equipment was nearby. His voice is young and unguarded, pitched somewhere between casual and terrified, which is precisely what gives it its honesty. The lyrical world is small and specific — the radius of a single crush, the universe shrinking to one person's proximity — and he doesn't try to make it larger than it is. This is the beauty of the song: it refuses grandeur. It belongs to the lineage of DIY indie pop that stretches from Jens Lekman through Mac DeMarco, but there is something distinctly Chilean-Norwegian about Pablo's warmth, a certain earnestness that doesn't calcify into irony. You put this on when you're walking to meet someone, heart doing slightly more than it should be doing.