INDIE SLEAZE IS SO BACK WITH J.PAUL'S VIBEY NEW TRACK “USED TO”

The children yearn for indie sleaze, and J.Paul delivers. His latest single, “Used To,” transports us to our 2010s Tumblr dashboards. It sits at the sweet-spot transitional period between Tumblr and MySpace, where The Strokes and the Arctic Monkeys hailed as kings. This revival was much-needed, with an added twist to provide lasting interest, and J.Paul has achieved this.

His guitar-driven single adds some surf-rock to Julian Casablancas-y's vocal stylings and mix. It’s a little slower, but that doesn’t make it less intriguing to listen to. There are a lot of choices being made here that other people might not have thought to do, like this specific blend of aesthetic delivery.

The distortion used on the guitars is super satisfying to the ears. There appear to be several layers of them in the mix, but no one layer overpowers another. Instead, each one does some of the “speaking” for J.Paul. I firmly believe that guitars speak just as loudly as lead vocalists. This track proves my theory to be true.

Winter is here; still, J.Paul’s “Used To” gets me excited for spring-into-summer, with clear skies and optimism overtaking everything. This is an interesting phenomenon, since the song carries a bit of a dark cloud of melancholia around it. However, the narration asserts that a bad day does not equal a bad life.