We first wrote about the music of Dylan Citron back in 2014 when, recording as Fairweather Currents, he released Truesdale, an album of intimate bedroom pop. This was cemented by 2015’s Things Get Better, an album we described as “incredibly pretty and more importantly… honest and heartfelt”, before Citron dropped the moniker in favour of bedbug, putting out buzzing like a bug in the snow earlier this year on Z Tapes. The latter was a clear progression from the earlier releases, keeping the core lo-fi folk/pop vibe while including some more experimental aspects and building a clear flow across the album, meaning it worked as a single, cohesive piece.
bedbug’s latest release, if i got smaller grew wings and flew away for good, sees further advancement in Citron’s sound and songwriting. The aforementioned flow has been developed further, with themes homed in on and explored across the thirteen songs, and the repetition of spoken word samples in the opening and closing tracks acting like a prologue and epilogue to the main narrative of the record. The experimental elements have also been improved and expanded, with an array of electronics and ambient noises flipping and spinning and haunting each track, adding a lovely depth to the otherwise simple melancholy.
Thematically, the album feels very much of our times, a chronicle of lonely young people comprising of honest, intimate thoughts, wistful, nostalgic instrumentation and the ever-pervasive interjections of pop culture. Televisual phrases pop up in and between songs, ghosts floating through the matrix of our digital world, falling into meaningful arrangements by fate or chance. This is backed up with song titles that could be half-ironic or pseudo-ironic or completely sincere, things like ‘animal crossing diary entries’ and ‘leaving town, moving to a national park’ and ‘i looked outside, it was hailing cactus needles’, all capped off with a <3. Quite whether these titles (and the childlike, pastel-coloured, equally-heart-strewn artwork) are earnest or sarcastic is unclear, perhaps even to Citron himself, though, a trademark of the 90s-born Sad Art aesthetic, that’s kind of the whole point.
We’re delighted to host the album in its entirety, so make yourself comfortable, kick back and lose yourself in the wonderfully sad/happy world of bedbug: