Willy Moon - Yeah Yeah

21-year-old New Zealander Willy Moon is a real pop star in the most traditional sense. Exuding the 1950s with his pristine sartorial image of sharp, smart suits, slicked back hair and eye for fashion, Moon is a promising contemporary pop idol with a retro twist. His debut single ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ got an awful lot of people excited at the back end of last year with its old fashioned yet impossibly catchy rockabilly sound and follow up ‘Yeah Yeah’ is even more exciting.

‘Yeah Yeah’ is 1950s rock and roll by way of an early 80s New York hip-hop block party. Moon’s hook filled and engaging vocals are set against a staggering concoction of beats, horn blasts and rhythms all colliding against each other. All these disparate styles should not really work but there is something very charming about Moon’s appropriation of sounds. The lyrics do not progress much further than exhortations to “Move to the sound of the beat,” but the lyrical simplicity does not really matter when a track is as thrilling as this. There is also a sense that despite Moon having clear retro sensibilities he would prefer to channel them against more progressive sounds.

There is undoubtedly a lot going on here but Willy Moon has brought it all together without the track lurching into novelty territory. In 2012, it’s unclear what may exactly constitute a hit record but here is an artist who should be having hit singles, perhaps this will be the track that catapults him into that pop stratosphere.