20-year-old multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer Oscar Lang has released a music video for “Antidote to Being Bored”. Previously this month, Lang announced that his third EP of 2020, Antidote to Being Bored, will be released on December 4 via Dirty Hit.
Fueled by wobbly synths and jangly guitars, the psychedelic folk-rock sound of “Antidote To Being Bored” intensifies Oscar’s transition from scuzzy, self-recorded experimentation towards fuller, warped and shimmering landscapes of noise. Referred to as the “Brian Wilson for Gen-Z” for his experimental approach to songwriting, Lang intersects the whimsical melancholy of Elliott Smith with the menacing intensity of 1990s indie bands like Neutral Milk Hotel and Sonic Youth, tinkering his sound until it screams with teen angst.
Lang admits: “I wrote Antidote to Being Bored to be an absolute blow-the-roof-off-the-stadium rock banger and I think it lives up to that. I wanted to get a little darker with this EP, while continuing the sound of the previous one. I feel like I really found a style of music that I love and am just excited to play. So, this release was all about developing that sound further.”
Lang immediately drew praise from BBC Radio 1’s Jack Saunders, Annie Mac, and Huw Stephens, and The FADER who premiered his lead single ”Hey” (ft. Alfie Templeman), and also included the track in their “18 best rock songs right now” column. The Line Of Best Fit made “Hey” their Song of the Day, while NME and others praised the EP’s five inventive and thrilling new tracks.
His self-released 2018 records Teenage Hurt and Silk were later pressed on limited yellow 12″ vinyl and re-released by Dirty Hit. The early records set the tone for his solo work — spanning lilting psych-hooks to dreamy washes of guitar to punchy millennial lyricism — and drew in hundreds of thousands of listeners in the process. In addition to Overthunk and bops etc., Lang partnered with Dirty Hit to write and produce beabadoobee’s 2018 release Patched Up and “Coffee,” which was recently featured in Powfu’s viral hit “death bed (coffee for your head”), the sixth most streamed song of summer 2020, having accumulated over 745 million streams on Spotify alone.