Default Genders
Fitting Out
FIVE YEARS IS AN ETERNITY IN THE LIFE CYCLE OF POP CULTURE. Yet, in dropping his first new music as Default Genders in half-a-decade, producer James Brooks is leaning into pop’s past, rather than focusing on its future.
His new album, Main Pop Girl 2019, gleefully filters modern pop through the gauzy haze of shoegaze and the hyperkinetic breakbeats of nightcore. Yet underlying those very au courant sounds is the ineffable longing for the not-sodistant past. “I didn’t really think too much about how it fits in, because it kind of doesn’t,” admits Brooks. “The response that I’ve gotten from people is ‘That’s why I like it.’”
The record’s nostalgia is rooted in early 2010s online culture that first inspired Brooks as one-half of Elite Gymnastics, whose dreamy, nostalgic take on ’90s rave music was lauded by music press. “You see stuff from outside the major label system flourish much less often,” he says. He points to a band like Animal Collective, whose breakthrough, Merriweather Post Pavilion, touched on a lot of the kinds of off-the-beatenpath genres championed in file-sharing communities, as a product of that digital stew. “When all these torrent trackers got wiped out by law enforcement, it really chopped the legs out of the whole phenomenon.
“Now it’s Spotify, and the major labels own like 30 percent of Spotify. I use it. I like it. I’m glad it’s there in some capacity, but it’s the cops. You’re never going to be able to do truly anti-establishment art on Spotify.”
Brooks’ profile was elevated when he began dating Claire Boucher, aka Grimes, which brought more public scrutiny to his own work, culminating in the 2013 release of Stop Pretending, his debut EP as Dead Girlfriends. Critics slammed the name and accused Brooks of mansplaining sexual assault on the song “On Fraternity.”
“I wrote about some serious stuff in a clunky way,” he says today. He rebranded as Default Genders and released Magical Pessimism 2014 before centring his energies on Boucher’s career. “The mistakes that I had made came dangerously close to affecting the careers of the people around me. I had this great fear of fucking it up and causing problems for the people that were close to me and my life.”
When they split up last year, Brooks once again began kicking around ideas. “[ Main Pop Girl 2019] was the first thing that kind of felt good and seemed to be coming together.”
Stop Pretending was an attempt make music that “fit in” with what was happening in indie music; he purposely didn’t use vocal effects, to make recreating those songs live easier. For this record, he pitches his voice high to sound more feminine, a chance to break free of gender binaries. “I felt very free to try a bunch of stuff that maybe I wouldn’t have when I felt like it was more of a spotlight on me,” he says. “Making this album was also kind of the process of me redefining how I think about myself.”
“I like Spotify. I’m glad it’s there in some capacity, but it’s the cops.”