JACK GARRATT

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Jack Garratt—it’s a name that has quickly seeped into our collective musical consciousness of late. He played a string of impressive festivals last summer, he’s been cropping up on Spotify Spotlight playlists for this year, and, most recently, he solidified this ascent by netting the BRITS Critics’ Choice Award last November and topping the BBC’s Sound of 2016 poll.

Garratt is warm and jovial, but more impressive is his astute awareness of the responsibilities that come with being an up-and-coming artist. “I feel like the next couple of years are obviously going to be crazy,” he says. “I’m in the best position at the moment. I’m very aware of that and I’m very grateful for the position I’m in because I’m discoverable. As in, I’m in enough places that people could find me if they wanted to and also people have shown that they are willing to try.” Fortunately, Garratt is on a trajectory that will most likely exceed his doubts. To spew a few clichés, this is a man with the world, and also his head, on his shoulders.

Garratt’s career began earlier than most. He jokes that he was “twitching in time to whatever sounds were around his mum’s womb,” a statement that is unquestionable, having listened to his immensely intricate live set and his groove-drenched beat syncopations. Watch him perform his recent single “Worry” at the Maida Vale Studios in London on YouTube, and it is virtuosity made flesh. It is instrumental genius, it is a rhythmic master class, and it feels so relevant.

You don’t wake up having been struck with this level of talent, and for Garratt its foundations are deeply embedded in his upbringing. “It’s a really, really strong trait of my bloodline, more of an inevitability than a choice,” he explains of his decision to pursue music, with his mother being a music teacher, his grandfather a “music hobbyist,” and his dad playing guitar. Yet despite this cemented inevitability, it wasn’t always as firm and dry as it is now. Garratt has done the maturing and dedicated himself to his art. Like many aspiring artists, he’s been through his fair share of incriminating projects. “Oh yeah, god yeah,” he laughs. “I was in a ska band as a kid. I played trombone and I played guitar in it. I was in a blues-rock band and I was in a straight-up blues trio as well. I was a heavy emo kid for a little while, but I also went through a big pop phase as well, as in bubblegummy, manufactured-feeling pop stuff.” Seemingly, one genre just isn’t enough for Garratt, and, in his own words, his current music still reflects this “genre-hoppy” disposition.

Garratt’s new album Phase is undoubtedly EDM inspired, but the extent of subtle musical twists and allusions is impressive. “The Love You’re Given,” probably the strongest track on the new album, begins with an almost operatic, haunting vocal, then progresses into a soft house beat with the title lyric repeatedly lulling over, sinking you into a mesmeric realm. There are subtle suggestions of Disclosure, a tinge of dubstep, and even a rock ballad–like drum pattern penetrating the background. Through Garratt’s idiosyncratic drip-feeding of genre, he lets the song surge and crescendo into a sublime emotional peak. Just judging from the plethora of school bands he was in, it’s apparent that Garratt’s musical influences are expansive and at times surprising. In recent years, he has moved from Justin Timberlake proving to him that pop music wasn’t necessarily the antithesis to good music to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly as a direct antecedent to a lot of his latest music, with the inevitable Bowie binge in between. Most recently, Garratt was indulging in Black Radio and Black Radio Two, two albums by the Robert Glasper Experiment that blend jazz and hip hop. This melange of inspirations allows his music to speak clearly over the noise of other contemporary radio drivel.

However, it is at heart Garratt’s vastly malleable personality that explains his almost philanthropic compulsion for genre-merging. “I am an empathizer, I think, and like to adapt and change myself for the sake of other people’s enjoyment of me, so it’s a very weird, selfish way of empathizing—or at least this is the person I was as an adolescent, I should say.” He explains: “I would change my attitude, my personality, and my clothes and my image and my thoughts depending on the kind of social group I was with at that time, not so that they would feel better around me, but so that they would like me. It’s a very selfish empathy.” Garratt offers up an honest account of the youthful erraticism that many would perhaps shy away from admitting, yet he understands that it’s the connection between him and the audience that is at the very center of his music. On the opening track of the album, “Coalesce,” he makes his intentions clear: “First I’ll open up your mind and coalesce with mine.”

Still, he understands that even his chameleon nature might not be enough to win over everyone. “If someone sits there and says, ‘I do not like Jack Garratt’s music,’ then I have to put my hands up and go, ‘Well then I can’t help you,’” he says. “There’s nothing I can do because I’ve tried to put every single kind of style and genre and theme and emotion I can into the music I make because I want people to like it. I want people to enjoy it.” He is a crowd pleaser, and that is precisely what he does.

However, the one crowd Garratt isn’t obliged to please is the one on the other side of the negotiation table. Quite unusually, Garratt reveals that his A&R team “respected from the start that the creative that goes into the record is from me and from no one else.” He managed to convince his label that authenticity and integrity lie at the heart of the artist and that without these, he would be selling himself as a lie. Garratt says that he’s “heard horror stories about things where songs get chosen for reasons other than [that] the artist wants it” and wisely sought to avoid such a dilemma by single-handedly mixing and producing the entirety of his new record, a noteworthy accomplishment of talent in its own right.

Despite Garratt’s breadth of knowledge, his self-production, and his incredible musical skill, there remains a sad truth: no matter how hard you try, or how hard you try to look like you are not trying, someone will inevitably sit you down and point out that you’re a dick. Garratt has witnessed this “shaming-obsessed culture” firsthand: “I get ‘hipster’ thrown at me all the fucking time because I wear snapbacks and I grow a beard. But what people don’t realize is that I’ve spent twenty-four years being insecure about my image and then I found an image that I was happy with and I felt comfortable in and now everyone feels the need to tell me that I look shit and it’s kind of just like, ‘For fuck’s sake—just chill.’”

So what if he has a ginger beard? Grow up. Garratt doesn’t exude self pity, though; rather, he has the confidence of someone who has reached clarity within himself. So don’t try to tell him any different, or you’ll be laughed off into the Twitter-sphere. “Who the fuck is this kid who’s going to get in touch with me and tell me that I’m shit, because like, who the fuck am I?” Who the fuck, after all, is anyone? It’s a lovely sentiment that might serve as a collective mantra for 2016. Jack Garratt is the attitude and the music of this moment, right now.

Phase is out Friday.