News Echo Shade

Even before Carles from Hipster runoff made up the term, people were already trying to say that chillwave (or glo-fi, as they were calling it back then) was dead or dying. And it’s not stopped, really, even with Ernest Greene crafting one of the albums of the year under his Washed Out moniker and many hundreds of people desperately trying to mimic the sound, there are still those who want to say it’s over.

So whilst the haters hate, there are those who just want to get on with it. Echo Shade has been doing just that since the turn of the year. The work of one guy named Lewis, he released an eponymous EP at the start of the year and has slowly seen the hype rise around him, blog posts becoming more fervent with each passing release. But the key to understanding this precocious young artist stills lies in that early EP.

The very reason that people have been able to convincingly declare the genre dead is that wannabe chillwave artists are often so lacking in invention. In truth, what others lake, Echo Shade more than makes up for - that debut EP shows more shades of ingenuity than decades worth of material elsewhere on bandcamp even attempts. At different points, he utilises almost tribal handclaps, soaring, faux-80’s synth and begins to specialising in crunchy, textured beats. This isn’t the work of someone wanting to make a facsimile of what has come before - it is someone trying to move it on the next level.

Encouragingly, he’s getting better at it, too. The latest dispatch comes in the form of a split with fellow young upstarts Betamaxx, encompassing two of Echo Shade’s finest efforts today. Whilst there’s always been a blueprint, Lewis appears to be adding depth and variation, near-imperceptible shifts in tone and pace that mark out the greats from the also-rans. Anyone who still says chillwave is dead clearly hasn’t heard Echo Shade yet.

Trust/Disaronno Brain Feed by Echo Shade vs Betamaxx