‘Shotput’ - Still Woozy is Fine; A Little Too Familiar
‘Shotput’ - Still WoozyArtist: Still Woozy Single: Shotput Genre: Indie pop, Psychedelic, Woozy Release Date: March 22nd, 2024
We got a new single from the enigmatic, genre-bending, every-so-groovy, California-based Sven Eric Gamsky, better known as Still Woozy. Odds are you’ve heard of him before. Amassing hundreds of millions of plays on several of his songs, he stormed onto the scene in 2020 and essentially invented a new genre. You know the sound.
But you don’t hear many songs today and think, “that sounds like Still Woozy.” That’s because the stuff he makes is really, really hard to make. The instruments layer over each other in ways that are impossible to replicate, and his audio plugins are tuned to breaking point. He’s a producer as much as he is a songwriter, and his sound is wonky and weird in the most charming way.
Praises aside, I thought Still Woozy was losing relevance. We hadn’t heard from him in awhile, and his most recent album didn’t match the meteoric heights he saw in 2020. The whole vibe was losing its freshness. A lot of the songs sounded similar to his old stuff, and his old tricks weren’t new and exciting anymore. On top of that, his girlfriend, now wife (Amiyah Kahn-Tietz, check out her website, it’s incredible), stopped doing his album art. Album art is almost always part of the conversation about Still Woozy: “they just fit the music perfectly - it makes the music even better.” The new album’s art, sans-Mrs. Woozy, was… experimental. It reminded me of the bad CGI of the early 2000s in an off-putting, uncanny valley kind of way. It detracted from the whole vibe. See below.
Which one of these things is not like the other?
Then, he struck gold and got a song featured on 2023’s “Anyone But You,” another hyper-trendy movie that promised to infatuate the masses with hot people in silly situations - entirely original. He wrote ‘Anyone But You,’ promising to be the title track of the movie, bolstering his popularity, and the trendiness levels of the movie. It amassed some very minor TikTok fame and flopped. He was truly losing his touch, and while attempting to sell out.
Enter 2024’s ‘Shotput.’ It’s a dance tune, a little more dance-y than his other stuff. The same old production techniques are here - sounds coming at you from every angle, off the wall guitar and bass riffs, creamy keyboards. The melody is catchy enough. Eyebrows raise at “you hit like a shotput” - what did he say? It’s not a bad song by any means, but it’s not going to get stuck in your head, and if you’ve heard other Still Woozy songs, you’ve heard this one too. It’s the same brand of elevator music on acid, and it can easily become background music if you’re not careful. The upside is we do get another Mrs. Woozy album cover.
We’ll see where Still Woozy goes with the upcoming album. It seems like he’s on the right path, better album-art and all. This reviewer selfishly hopes he goes somewhere new and recaptures our attention. He is still the incredibly talented producer, instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter that we grew to love in 2019, and there’s still a chance he’ll steel himself against industry pressures and deliver something incredible.
Check him out on Socials:
https://open.spotify.com/artist/4iMO20EPodreIaEl8qW66y?si=2yK_CHvETEiIy3gFOt_vjQ
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