Beautiful People

Malcolm Todd's "Beautiful People" runs on a loose, sunlit groove — live-feeling drums with a slight drag behind the beat, a warm bass that walks rather than thumps, guitar chords strummed with jazz voicings and no urgency. It's the sound of a young multi-instrumentalist producing himself in a bedroom and getting a band's looseness out of it. Todd's voice is light, boyish, and a little wry, sliding into falsetto without ceremony and sitting so far forward in the mix that he sounds like he's leaning toward you across a table. The lyric is charmingly ambivalent: an observation of the attractive, effortless people who seem to move through life without friction, sung by someone who is half-admiring and half-suspicious of them and not sure which side he's on. That ambivalence is the song's honesty. Culturally he belongs to the wave of Gen-Z artists who learned soul and yacht-rock from streaming rather than radio and reassembled it without reverence. The emotional landscape is easy melancholy, a good mood with a small stone in its shoe. Perfect for a slow afternoon drive with the windows down and nowhere in particular to be.