Oliver Wilde

Hometown: Bristol
Lineup: Oliver Wilde
For fans of: Atlas Sound, Panda Bear, Christopher Owens
Key track: ‘Perrett’s Brook’
See him live: 24 July, Strongrooms, London
Connect: Facebook | SoundCloud | Twitter | Tumblr

Bristol-based songwriter, Oliver Wilde, isn’t the easiest UnDiscovered act we’ve tried to categorize.

He can’t seem to pin down his own sound even, flippantly labelling it some combination of lo-fi, ‘glitch tinsel’ and ‘alternative dad rock fizz’ on his Facebook and SoundCloud pages. Perhaps it’s this sense of total unfamiliarity which makes his bedroom conceived work so damned well exciting.

Take free download ‘Curve (Good Grief)’ for instance, the track that really announced his arrival proper, packed full of jarring clipped and pitched vocal samples and atmospheric hi-hat ticks; it swoops down somewhere between Bradford Cox’s malaise ‘n’ reverb-saturated work under the Atlas Sound moniker and Panda Bear’s densely textured, infinitely looping ritualistic pop.

And that’s not all he has in his locker. Wilde’s skittish voice, an impenetrable instrument in itself, recalls Christopher Owens’s brittle yet cathartic croon with dreamily melded notes of an incredibly strung-out Kurt Vile woven into each disorientating lyric. Occasionally disembodied to the point of total loss, the hypnogogic effect his voice lends to the melody is nothing short of bliss.

Wilde is currently streaming a jagged experimental-pop behemoth from his debut album, A Brief Introduction to Unnatural Lightyears which is mixed, mastered and ready to go on 22 July via Bristol’s trustiest indie, Howling Owl Records.

We mightn’t be able to slot him into a neat little genre pigeonhole but if ’Perrett’s Brook’ is anything to go off, we’re more than happy to take a punt on his first LP being the DIY sleeper hit of summer 2013.