Bakar

One Liner:  Top tier vibe guy making surprisingly enjoyable indie rock

Wikipedia Genre: indie rock

Home: London

Poster Position: 12
Both Weekends.
Sunday at 3:45.

T-Mobile Stage.

Thoughts:   His top two songs are freaking fantastic.  I've heard one of them many times, in the background of my day, because it is used on TikTok all the time and so my daughters' phones have given me tinny little versions of this laid back beauty many times.  "Hell N Back" has 545.6 million streams.

Lyrically, not that amazing, but the throwback soul groove right there is money in the bank.  Absolutely makes me feel good and happy and like life is good.  It was also in the trailer for that Pixar movie Elemental, which is kind of funny.

Abubakar Baker Shariff-Farr (that is a hell of a confusing ass name to try to consider or spell  Abubakar Baker?  Really?) was born in London in 1994.  After being raised in Camden, North London, for a while, he ended up in boarding school in Surrey.  Which sounds so properly British.  He began making music by sampling other bands and uploading his creations to Soundcloud, but released his first actual single in 2017.  That one blew up because, somehow, it was selected to be on the soundtrack for FIFA 2019.  Which is freaking weird.  Why would that huge video game franchise pick some little unknown, poppy, indie rock tune for the game?  Maybe they didn't need to pay much for it or something.  I remember "Song 2" being the intro for a FIFA game in like 1998 or so and how it pumped me up so that I wanted to run through a brick wall.

Three albums - 2018's Badkid, 2022's Nobody's Home, and 2023's Halo, but the 2019 EP called Will You Be My Yellow has that big hit up above and another smaller hit with Dominic Fike, who I only just realized has dropped off of the ACL poster this year.  Jerk.  I hope they replace him with Taylor Swift.  None of the stuff on those two more recent albums (except for a remix of "Hell N Back") gets anywhere near those streaming numbers, but here is "Alive!" which I think is definitely fun and is on the new album.  20.1 million streams.

I wonder if that video is legit him blocking traffic to film.  He has kind of a funny vocal delivery - it is definitely singing, but also a little more like speaking.  I'm playing the new album again right now, and it just has this great sense of fun.  A song can have a sort of sped up Cure sound, and then the next will be a little more morose and coffeehouse-ish, and then "Right Here, For Now" pops up with bright guitars and a danceable backbeat.

Surprisingly enjoyable stuff!