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HEAR HIM RAUR

A New Voice Emerges From the Indigo Child


"I am the Savior. Savior. Savior!"

That’s a chant from the end chorus of “God’s Whisper,” a song about intuition and following your own voice that fuses a surprising range of styles from alternative folk to world music and soul. This sort of shape-shifting is the specialty of a youngster who calls himself Raury. One of the most original and most talked-about artists to appear in recent years.

Raury’s music torched the Internet all last year with headlines like “Have You Heard This?! immediately putting the young writer/producer behind it all on everyone’s Artists to Watch list.

The debut EP Indigo Child was self-released for free last September, backed by in-house collective and label LoveRenaissance which had just signed with Columbia after an intensive bidding war. Indigo Child embodies a wide range of ideas and sonic styles, part of the “post-genre” movement in music today.

But the most compelling part of Indigo Child is how it evokes a sophisticated musicality and lyrical world view that resonates far beyond Raury's 18 years on this planet. To underscore just how young he is, the EP is stitched together by a series of interludes that are real arguments with his mom secretly recorded (and released with her persmission), which serves to authentically verbalize his struggle for the individuality and freedom that you then experience in his music.

This level of transformational creativity is something we’ve come to expect from the fertile musical soil of Atlanta, where Raury was raised out in the suburbs of Stone Mountain. He picked up a guitar at age 11 and taught himself to play, citing influences like Kid Cudi, Phil Collins, Bon Iver, Michael Jackson and Adele. He can now count Kanye West and Andre 3000 among his fans and champions.

Raury, who's #4 on the BBC Sounds of 2015 list, has released several singles from the EP, including the catchy jaunt “Cigarette Song,” created a PSA-styled clip for “Seven Suns" that addresses his generation's inability to put down their cellphones, and this week teaches everyone about the most important moments in black history with the animated video for his new single "Fly."

This is precisely why people connect to Raury’s music so powerfully: He's an artist who comes equipped with incredibly original sounds and an uplifting, honest message about hope and determination for a better future. Look for his first full-length from Columbia later this year.

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