Just last month, a_shes released his debut album young adult fiction. Featured in Fame Magazine and NOTION, it is his most complex and profound body of work. Spanning ten tracks, the UK-based alt-pop star carries his audience through a timewarp of sounds and social context. With nods to the days of Tumblr scroll sessions in the early 2010s, to coming of age during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, young adult fiction will resonate deeply with Gen Z and millenials alike. However, a fear of bidding your past adieu knows no age – it is universal.
a_shes relies on the sounds of the 80s, synths and keyboards with an electronic flair, adding in a sprinkle of the music he grew up loving in his teens. As his confessional lyrics tackle big moves, parties, impermanent relationships, loneliness, and grief, young adult fiction carefully situates itself among its inspirations; Troye Sivan’s Blue Neighbourhood and Lorde’s Pure Heroine.
He explains, ““To me, it’s [the album] a belated coming-of-age tragedy, especially for those of us who never had the cinema-perfect teenhood we saw on screen. It is a record about the anxieties of early adulthood and the stark realization that the real world is not like what we had fantasized or imagined.”
