Elyar Fox

In his original promotional film, Fox described getting a guitar in 2005 and moving from playing into writing songs. The account also gave credit to the listeners following him online, who became part of the route to a professional recording career. That background helps explain the particular kind of pop identity he was developing: a songwriter's early habits meeting an audience that could respond before an official single existed.

Do It All Over Again was released through RCA in January 2014 and reached number five in Britain. The production puts the refrain to work quickly, with a vocal designed to stay intelligible inside a strong electronic arrangement. Its immediacy was part of the point. A debut has little time to introduce a singer, and this record makes the melodic hook and the performance arrive together.

A Billion Girls followed in spring 2014 and reached number eleven. In contemporary interviews Fox described a mixture of guitar-based influences and more overtly club-oriented pop, naming Nirvana and Good Charlotte among the records that had encouraged him to play. Those references make the contrast inside his early work more interesting than the surface of one dance-pop single might suggest. The singing had to accommodate both a writer's connection to an instrument and a production style built for broad radio exposure. The first two RCA singles capture that encounter at its clearest. Their energy is deliberately immediate, but the underlying task is a familiar songwriter's problem: make a phrase simple enough to remember without losing the person who is meant to be saying it.