Los Angeles singer-songwriter and producer Urika’s Bedroom is fascinated with driving. Perhaps it’s growing up in the Midwest, or their new life amidst the L.A. sprawl, but automobiles hold a special place in their heart. They cruise around L.A. in a pickup truck, always listening to music. Their ‘90s nostalgia-tinged single “XTC” opens up with the lines, “I wanna ride for you through the night/Wheels to the road/Ecstasy overdrive.” The wistful track conjures up memories of going for a drive with their father when they were a child. “It is very simply a song about the way a late night drive makes me feel.”
Their upcoming self-produced debut album Big Smile, Black Mire out now via True Panther, is good driving music. Thematically, it’s about finding a way to interpret the vagueness of life. Musically, it blends shoegaze, early ‘90s emo, and electronica. The record, and their career so far, grew out of a long cross-country road trip that Urika took with their brother from the midwest to L.A. in 2018 in search of new surroundings that would stoke their creative flame.
“I felt like it was a challenge. If you go to L.A. and figure it out, then you can figure it out anywhere,” they say. “I knew it'd be hard.” They cut their teeth playing in the punk band 2070, who relentlessly played “a million shows” in two years all over Southern California from Long Beach to the San Fernando Valley. This served as a type of punk rock primer, building on the love for music they’d found as a child listening to Gorillaz’s Demon Days and Outkast’s The Love Below.
In high school, Urika and a classmate with a basic studio setup — a computer and a microphone — would rap over tracks in a basement, sparking their interest in producing. When they headed off to college at Michigan State University, Urika purchased a laptop and instantly downloaded Ableton, diving into working on music under various aliases. “I released an almost unlistenable, lo-fi ambient piece on cassette,” they say with a self-deprecating chuckle.
Just like the genre-hopping albums that led them down the path of producing for themselves and other artists like Ded Hyatt and Teen Vogue faves Untitled Halo. But listening to Jimi Hendrix at a young age inspired Urika to want to play guitar. Their first instrument was the drums, but they had a deep desire to be a guitar player, something they wrestled with as a youth. “I think I had some identity struggle with playing guitar,” they admit. “Being Black it’s hard to place yourself in alternative music.” In a serendipitous turn of events , their debut album serves as an ode to the guitar, as they introduce their own innovative approach to the instrument, much like their guitar hero Hendrix did decades ago.
“I'm going to play guitar, but I'm recognizing it as a symbol, so I don't want it to be straightforward,” they say about the album’s unusual use of the instrument. “We're going to take it apart in the studio.” On Big Smile, Black Mire, Urika’s guitar is melancholic, using simple but emotive guitar riffs that harken to ‘90s midwest emo bands ike Mineral and The Promise Ring. But the deconstruction lies in the spaces between the riffs. Glitchy, mechanical whirrs and electronic sounds blend into the background, occasionally surfacing to remind the listener of a skipping CD. Urika made it a point to not use any synthesizers on the album; the confounding sounds are made by processing guitars through granular synthesis and noise from guitar pedals. “I am a huge fan of Tim Hecker and Fennesz. I'm trying to make all [those types of sounds] from guitar. Even if it doesn't sound like a guitar.”
Like Hecker and Fennesz, both ambient musicians with an evocative vision, Urika’s Bedroom creates a textured, almost 3D world that invites listeners to sit in the in-between. In the quiet moments when guitars are destroyed and obscured, Urika’s hushed and dreamy vocals are exposed, mixed front and center. They acknowledge that singing may not be their strong suit, as they have been playing guitar for much longer than they’ve been using their voice. For them, it’s about embracing the fragility of imperfection. “I think a lot of the album is just about being vulnerable,” Urika says. “Not that I am exposing everything about myself in the lyrics, but it is about the feeling of being exposed, what does it feel like to be vulnerable?”
Urika writes about those nebulous aspects of existence with sparse poeticism. An avid reader, they cite writers like the surrealist Luis Borges and queer literary icon James Baldwin as inspiration for the lyrics on their debut. Words are most important to them, as they’ve been writing poetry even longer than writing and producing music. “I think life is so complex and I think I'm always trying to figure out how I can convey how it feels just to be alive and feeling multiple things at once,” Urika says. Big Smile, Black Mire is an album that’s constantly vacillating between contradicting emotions, often within the same song.
“XTC” is a song about nostalgia, but it's also about “violent rebirth,” as they put it. “Video Music” is a folktronica Trojan horse that appears to explore romantic yearning but is in fact a reflection on personal anxiety. “Romance, intimacy, and longing based outside of yourself, is easier for people to connect to,” they explain. The trip-hop inspired track “Circle Games” also cleverly uses love as a red herring, presenting a seemingly simple romantic narrative to mask a more insidious message. The track flickers between the dangers of love and a critique of the parasitic nature of the music industry. “Life is always flipping on its head,” they say, “and I think that's why I was trying to express that twisting and turning.”
The title of the album itself reflects those contradictory states. Big Smile, Black Mire can mean smiling through the difficult moments or in a darker interpretation, pretending to be happy to mask the pain. But for Urika it is about a “multivalent emotional space” — the jarring push and pull of our current world. “It is almost like being on Instagram and scrolling and seeing somebody’s fit pic and then you scroll and you see Palestine, it's like, wait, what the f*ck am I consuming?” they explain. “How am I supposed to interpret those things next to each other?”
Though the album dives into these existential conundrums, the self-described Tumblr kid says, “I’m a f*cking clown. I'm unbearably jokey on the road,” referencing their upcoming European tour dates with New York pop-experimentalists Chanel Beads. Though their star is on the rise, and “a lot of shit has happened really fast,” for an artist on the brink of their debut, Urika doesn’t take themselves too seriously. They’re not buying into the hype. “I've been learning to care less about what [my music career] means to other people as opposed to what it means to me.” In a moment where experimental rock is reaching the zeitgeist with artists like Mk.gee, who recently performed on Saturday Night Live, starting to make waves in the music industry, Urika is doing their best to stay grounded and think about what excites them about their craft. “How do I even distance myself and make sure I'm just doing me and not doing the culture?” they ask.
Urika reflects on the weight of releasing their new album. They’re less concerned about its reception, and true to their nature as a subversive musician, Urika is already eager to reinvent themselves. “I think there's starting to be expectations, but there's enough room where I can slip out,” they say. “I can still blow it all up.”
Even if they were to completely dismantle and reconfigure what they’ve created with Big Smile, Black Mire, their spirit would remain steadfast. Regardless of what it sounds like, at its core, the record explores the tension of holding two emotional states at once — the guilt of finding joy in grief, the unexpected hope in a seemingly doomed world. Or as Urika puts it best about their track “Circle Games,” it’s about “stating your fears and, despite that, offering your heart.”
