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“Cry,” a fan-favorite off Benson Boone’s debut album, Fireworks & Rollerblades, begins as a ballad, with Boone murmuring delicate lyrics over a meticulously plucked guitar. But a couple of traces in, he pivots. “Nah, nah, nah, that doesn’t feel right,” he says, slicing off the music. Then a drum beat arrives, the tempo picks up, and Boone’s voice jumps to a hair-metal-esque falsetto. In a matter of seconds, “Cry” has develop into an offended, edgy pop-rock music.
Boone may’ve sung both model. The 21-year-old rising star can slyly maneuver by way of nearly any sound in immediately’s pop panorama, overstuffing his songs with a buffet of mainstream types. Take his breakout hit “Beautiful Things,” which has spent a lot of spring soundtracking TikToks and sitting within the higher tier of the Hot 100, the place it peaked at No. 2. It opens as a confessional pop-folk music within the vein of Noah Kahan or Zach Bryan, earlier than morphing right into a rough-edged anthem impressed by his mentor, Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons, with flashes of Harry Styles’s neo-classic rock. Almost something a pop listener may wish to hear comes someplace throughout its three-minute run time. It’s not a recipe for altering pop music, however it’s one for sticking round. Taylor Swift, a fellow maximalist, has even acknowledged his success, tapping Boone to open her London show on June 23 (after he already carried out with Lana Del Rey throughout her Hangout Festival set).
When “Beautiful Things” started to rise earlier this spring, Boone was standing within the shadow of Kahan, whose uncooked folks songs with festival-ready pop hooks had simply earned him a Grammy nomination. But Boone doesn’t match neatly into that comparability. For the primary 12 months of his profession, he discovered extra success as a pop balladeer like Lewis Capaldi. Boone had auditioned for the 2021 season of American Idol with the vaguely emotional piano ballad “Punchline,” by Aidan Martin. After Boone declined a spot within the prime 24, he launched his personal vaguely emotional piano ballad, “Ghost Town.” That music confirmed his doable multi-quadrant enchantment, touring from TikTok to adult-contemporary radio and simply barely cracking the Hot 100. Audiences didn’t chew on his ’80s-ish followup “Room for 2,” however his subsequent music behind the piano, “In the Stars” — a tribute to his late nice grandmother — bested “Ghost Town” on the charts.
But Boone hadn’t got down to make ballads. He began singing within the first place due to Jon Bellion, identified for his signature model of frenetic, hooky stadium-pop. After “Stars,” Boone tried to emulate it on a handful of singles earlier than lastly getting the mix proper with “Beautiful Things.” That music allowed Boone to play each the soul-baring singer and the cool rock star, proving he may croon at one second and snarl within the subsequent. (Timing additionally helped — “Beautiful Things” broke out as Universal Music Group had left TikTok in a drought, opening a lane for savvy artists on different labels like Boone, underneath Warner Music. The music has now soundtracked practically 3.5 million movies.) It’s an strategy he takes throughout Fireworks & Rollerblades, which follows within the footsteps of Olivia Rodrigo by discovering house for each the slower heart-wrenchers and brasher pop songs. On Boone’s subsequent hit-in-waiting, “Slow It Down,” he captures the identical youthful desperation of songs like “drivers license” earlier than blowing issues up right into a theatrical, Bellion-esque music.
It takes a set of pipes to cowl that form of floor. The most spectacular factor about Fireworks is Boone’s uncooked vocal expertise — his voice is extra highly effective and nice than many charming teen-pop stars earlier than him. But it might be good to listen to him commit to at least one type of music for quite a lot of minutes. Compelling concepts seem on Fireworks & Rollerblades, however as a substitute of Boone teasing them additional, he prefers to drag the rug out.
That’s exactly what made “Beautiful Things” a success, after all, and stands to maintain Boone round a minimum of by way of subsequent 12 months’s Grammys as an early Best New Artist entrance runner. But the danger of Boone’s music is that pop strikes shortly. If he can match that tempo and preserve increasing his palate as new tendencies arrive — similar to how he rode Kahan’s pop-folk wave — he may have a technique to stay round lengthy after his Eras Tour look.
