Malcolm Todd

One Liner:  Super lo-fi bedroom pop/rock guy that I already can't remember

Wikipedia Genre:  No Wikipedia, this is bedroom pop/rock

Home: L.A.

Poster Position: 11 (MUCH higher than I expected)
Both Weekends.
Sunday at 2.

T-Mobile Stage.

Thoughts:  Malcolm Todd was an English archeologist who passed away in 2013.  He conducted notable excavations at sites of Roman Britain.  So there you have it.  That guy's corpse will be here to play jenky synth music.  There is also a South African archer with this name, and an English actor named Malcolm Tod (star of 1926's The Woman Tempted.  Sounds lascivious!)

But actually, this is a dude who dropped out of the University of Oregon one week after he started, so that he could move back to L.A. and live the dream of making lo-fi synth R&B stuff.  He became a TikTok sensation by labeling his music as "Steve Lacy's new music," which seems kinda shitty?  My main motivation right now is to finish writing about this so that I can stop listening to these songs.  I have been busy today and so this has played much longer than I would have liked for it to.

2022 EP Demos Before Prom, 2023 EP Shower Shoes, and then the 2024 album Sweet Boy.  "Roommates," a breakup tune with an oddly tuned guitar, is the big hit, from the new album.  36.8 million streams.

Meh.  His voice isn't especially strong and the video is bugging me, but it just seems weird to me that this is such a hit.  Stupid TikTok messing with the stream counts of the world.  It isn't awful or anything, just nothing special in here for me.  Almost all of the top tracks are from that new disc, but I'm going to do one of the older ones just for analysis purposes.  "Out of Bounds" has 11 million streams and another jenky ass video with too much talking.

Straight bedroom vibes - you can just imagine this teenager playing this in his bedroom, gently strumming those nonexistent notes on his guitar with his drum machine motoring along on his bedside stand.  Again, not terrible, just lacking any umph or hook that would make me light up about hearing it.