New single from EXES is a love-it-or-hate-it gamechanger.

 

Creativity and individuality are two traits that are quite difficult to find in the pop music genre. Other than when we witness great shifts in taste, the pop scene tends to be quite set in its ways of being consistently safe and popular.

Not anymore.

Venice Beach pop duo EXES have changed the game with their latest offering, the genre-smashing blur of sounds that is Dear, Home. Balancing somewhere between pop, experimental, world, electronic and pretty much every genre you can imagine, the song strikes a compellingly strange musical world.

It opens unassumingly, with a slow staccato-driven build of instrumentation and a vocal sample – nothing we’ve never heard before. And for the first minute, this remains true as it sounds just like a standard soft pop song. Once the chorus arrives, however, things change and your ears are either immediately interested or instantly repelled by the unusual vocal melody.

In pop, we’re so used to predictable vocal melodies used as hooks, but there is something haunting and fascinating about the ethereal line. This happens again during the bridge, with vocal melodies that are deliberately jarring to keep an air of fascination and intrigue, while all the time bewildering listeners. It’s an extremely unusual track, and you will either love it or hate it – there is no middle ground.