What is bedroom pop?

"I don't have much, I'm not going to lie to you / I don't have a mansion / I live in a small flat with one room." Without intending to, those verses of Cupido in one of their hits, "Milhouse", could well summarise the essence of bedroom pop. Irresistible pop melody for an accurate generational portrait, projecting much more enthusiasm than possibilities. The band formed by the trapper Pimp Flaco and the members of Solo Astra invited us to enter their charming and naïve world where everything is possible and, more importantly, where everything is born and expands within the limits of our room.

And if it wasn't out there, what would bedroom pop be? Well, as soon as we start looking hard, and if we are strict, what we find is a genre that is not a genre. As with many other trends in popular culture, it would be debatable to identify bedroom pop as a specific musical style, and there are already artists and actors in the music industry who have started rejecting it. Love/hate for labels is eternal so what can we say, music lover.

But the concept can be refined, and among its most characteristic features we find above all a "Do It Yourself" spirit with minimalist production, not to say amateur, tending towards Lo Fi and also to pop melodies, although not necessarily. For the moment that leaves out Metallica and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, so now, and at committee level, we should confess that "bedroom pop" is really just an idea. A symbolic intimate field where musical expertise is not as important as the need to express our innermost introspective thoughts.

We are talking about musical expertise without generalising, but a bit of nerve goes a long way. No need to master an instrument before jumping in at the deep end, because time flies! So with a bit of cheek and lots of enthusiasm benchmarks have emerged, including Billie Eilish, Sports, the Norwegian Girl in Red and Clairo, a new generation of artists who were never going to wait to get into large recording studios to start unleashing their songs. 

Without going so far, names associated with the concept easily come to us, these include Cariño, Rojuu, Marcelo Criminal and Casero. Projects that start from different coordinates and have different objectives but share a philosophy and sound aesthetics. It is not even about sticking to home recording, because the above-mentioned Cupido are already being managed at a higher level while emerging artists such as Laura Katze barely has a couple of songs on Spotify. And the feeling is very much the same.

A new language. A way of life and doing things and, in short, a hallmark of a generation Z that is as entertaining as it is sometimes indecipherable. The concept of bedroom pop, strongly boosted in the 2010s by necessity or as a mere aesthetic decision, experienced an even greater upturn due to the circumstances derived from the lockdown, with webcams running wild and a whole new generation of artists dealing with lockdown and discovering freshness and creativity. What else could they do?

The appearance and extraordinary development of the Internet at the end of the last century together with technological democratisation now provide equal access when it comes to producing and publishing music, largely removing the bottleneck previously caused by traditional studios and filtering by record labels. The desire to share with our fans applied to music, without great commercial pretensions at first. The strength arising from the possibility of recording your music with a more than acceptable quality was the ideal breeding ground for a new batch of musicians who have something to say.