Pop quiz. These are your options. Hobo Johnson is:
A) Extravagant pro wrestling power-slam
B) Overly ambitious sex manoeuvre
C) The oddball new artist you absolutely need to know right now
The answer’s obviously C, but A and B both kind of work: Hobo Johnson possesses all of the aspirational and unhinged romance you could ever want for in an artist, and he absolutely bodies you with it; his songs are performative, elbowy trauma.
He’s a dude from California named Frank who used to be homeless (accounting for the “Hobo” moniker), and he first gained notoriety after entering an NPR song contest last year.
Maybe you saw when him when was out here for Falls Festival and Field Day with his band, The Lovemakers. If you didn’t, it’s the perfect time to get on board. We’ve added his new song, ‘Typical Story’ to radio rotation here at triple j.
'Typical Story' sounds like what you’d imagine being crash tackled by a fridge would feel like, because it’s f**king crushing, and wild, and now there’s hommus and avocado everywhere, all over everything.
It’s also really good – there’s something undeniable about how intense it all is, how desperate the quiet parts sound and how victorious all the loud parts sound, and how it does all of that at such pace that the song never ever borders on being boring.
It’s also a big step up on his previous work. The song he’s best known for, ‘Peach Scone’, is woebegone street poetry paired in patchy Bluetooth to an acoustic guitar – no disrespect, it deservedly drew attention because it is so manically lovely – but by contrast, ‘Typical Story’ is a Hobo Glo Up.
It accentuates the bombast and batshit that have become trademarks of Johnson’s delivery, grating synths and bass accounting for much of the song’s suspense and surprise. It suits him: having access to tricked-out production means the band can go all-in (or all-out) to serve the performance and the lyric, which is sick.
Plus, dude has learned to write a chorus. This is easily his best one, the gigantic “hey! hey!” part is sure to become a live staple.
It sounds like the song-construction part of Hobo Johnson is catching up to the performance and lyric-writing part of Hobo Johnson, and when they do catch up, watch out, because there’s so much potential for him to become something unexpectedly universal.
Basically, this song might as well arrive in your ears naked, on horseback, playing the bagpipes. You have no f**king idea why it is the way it is, but you can’t turn away from it. It’s completely, bizarrely, totally compelling. And you need to hear it again.