Cullen Omori - The Diet

When Cullen Omori released his debut solo album in 2016 he couldn’t have expected its title, ‘New Misery’, would become so self-fulfilling. In the record’s release week, his tour van broke down, requiring expensive repairs. Two suitcases of clothes were later stolen from a replacement vehicle and, eventually, Cullen cancelled the tour. In its name, at least, follow-up ‘The Diet’ finds him trying to deal with the ramifications of all that drama - namely trying to cut back on indulging in the negative feelings he was left with.

Once part of hyper-buzzy Chicago group Smith Westerns, the 28-year-old has already proven he can still write brilliant pop without his bandmates once before. For his second solo album, he’s expanding his horizons with a series of grander compositions. ‘Millennial Geishas’ starts off like a Primal Scream song that’s just about being prevented from flying high, morphing into an epic dreamscape of a chorus. Closer ‘Real You’ opens with fingerpicked guitar hooks that possess nursery rhyme inflections that later get hidden under hazy surges.

The glam-pop of Cullen’s past is mostly a distant spectre on ‘The Diet’ (it makes a brief appearance in the Suede-y riffs of ‘Quiet Girl’) and that’s no bad thing. There’s only so long you can stay in one lane without getting bored of the scenery, after all. Instead, this is a record of pushing out of comfort zones and not settling for traditional approaches.

Take the bright ‘Happiness Reigns’, for example - a song about the musician’s current girlfriend. Instead of just writing an ode to his partner, Cullen asked her to write with him. The results are loved up lyrics (“Darling, there’s no one like you / Your presence and your love is like a perfume”) underpinned by more vulnerable moments that make everything more human. The events of two years ago might have left Cullen dejected, but he’s managed to spin beauty out of those bad times.