Weatherday

Weatherday is the project of Sputnik, a Swedish producer whose debut record — recorded largely at home and distributed online — has become one of the most quietly influential releases in the contemporary bedroom-shoegaze and hyperpop-adjacent world. The work sits at a crossroads: shoegaze distortion, emo melody, bedroom-pop intimacy, hyperpop willingness to break any rule the moment it gets comfortable. Part of what makes Weatherday important is that the record exists. A single self-recorded album, put online without the apparatus of a label or a PR cycle, has found an audience the way great work has always found one: through people telling other people. This is the oldest distribution model and still the most reliable. The stylistic vocabulary Weatherday works in is one that more and more American bedroom artists have been drawing from. The distorted guitars treated as textures rather than riffs, the vocals that are simultaneously intimate and shredded, the songs that refuse to announce their genre — all of that is part of a shared language now. Nonesuch indexes Weatherday because the most important American music of this decade is, increasingly, not American, and the internet has made that distinction less useful than it used to be.