VMP Magazine

VMP Rising is our series where we partner with up-and-coming artists to press their music to vinyl and highlight artists we think are going to be the Next Big Thing. Today we’re featuring Playroom, the debut LP from lo-fi alt-R&B artist Nathan Bajar. Playroom is out on vinyl now in the VMP store, and you can read our interview with him below.

Photos by Harshvardhan Shah.

The words “sheltered” and “isolation” seem to come up a lot in my conversation with 24-year-old Orion Sun, to the point where the words just spill out of her mouth effortlessly. In between our thoughts, the pockets of silence echo in my ear and disappear into the emptiness of both of our suburban homes.

Wading in the middle of a sea of early ’00s pop twinkles and silky ’80s synths is Magdalena Bay, comprised of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin.

Angel Olsen is comfortable with herself.

Charlie Steen is a character, ripped straight from the pages of an Irvine Welsh novel without the Scottish dialect. He exudes a particular ferocity and scrappiness best exemplified by British punk. Within a few short years, his band Shame captured the slow boil of working-class anger and adolescent loneliness which catapulted them into the messiahs of a new era of rock music. Then, the pandemic happened.

On a particularly hot morning, I find myself trying to find out how to get back to the original point of my conversation with London-based rock outfit Gaygirl. Instead, guitarist Lewis Clark uncovers a strange memory from his teenage years playing in bands with his schoolmates. “One day in school, we had a climbing wall built for us and we played at the opening for this climbing wall.” The laughs died down, and as we approached the next question, Clark interjects, “No one used that climbing wall. It smelled like fish.”