I’ve covered Until The Ribbon Breaks a few times this year (check out “Pressure” and his remix of Tegan and Sara’s “Closer”), and I hold true to my claim: he’s the future of chillstep R&B.

Pitchfork calls his style “apocalyptic pop,” but I think that’s an incredibly shallow reading. After all, how much does love fucking mean in an end-of-times scenario? The purveyors of actual apocalypse pop like KOTA and Fol Chen, evoke emotional worlds of a radically altered emotional core to humans. The grandiose nature of their music is meant to make the listener know there is a line that has been crossed and the emotions they paint are what the new world looks like.

“2025” is Until The Ribbon Breaks’ making inventive, dystopian pop. It’s about a resurgence of traditional life within the grimness and a willingness to stake out that claim no matter the cost. It allows him to utilize incredibly effective double edged lyrics like, “It’s cool to be lonely, didn’t you know?” to indicate distaste with the shallow intensity of love in these times as well as signal it’s okay to be just yourself in a time that forces you into superficiality.

In Until The Ribbon Breaks’ dystopian pop there is always romantic undercurrent bubbling under the surface of the darkness; I don’t think there’s anyone else like him on the scene.

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