By zak kolesar

It’s safe to say that almost every musician was confronted with the same problem early on during lockdown—a lack of studios to record in and concert halls to perform at. This led to the live stream revolution, prompting DIY-minded folks to turn an office or a bedroom into a makeshift music lab. Creating music out of your bedroom isn’t a new invention, however. The woozy and intimate sounds that come out of a session where you’re working on your laptop while stopping atop their comforter, of course, became a household genre with the drastic ascension of Billie Eilish’s career. Although he didn’t achieve as much mainstream success, the late Lil Peep carved out an avenue in rap almost entirely his own with his visceral bedroom musings. Lyrically, a lot of songs categorized as bedroom pop are the thoughts of people at their most vulnerable: when they’re alone.

Mood pop duo chomp!, which is made up of Kelsey Yappel and Amari Keller, had been accustomed to the bedroom music aesthetic long before shutdown. As a group that has evolved from practicing in living rooms to playing house shows, the intimate palette of vibes is a wide and varying offering across the five-song, self-titled EP, which came out at the beginning of April. These playlist-prone tracks all carry a deep and dark ambience to them, at times making you feel like you’re sleeping in a bed of quicksand. It’s a strangely comforting feeling due to these three-minute songs almost serving as shorter versions of more comprehensive trip-hop tracks. 

These personal sounds and lyrics on “moon landing” like “We wouldn’t say our prayers/Unless we needed to,” fit the general bedroom decadence of the group’s first compilation. But duos set up in this realm of DIY are reliant on an almost unspoken chemistry in making their music. Even before speaking with either member of chomp!, the musical and vocal parts from Keller and Yappel are indiscernible. The two have come together to craft a voice that is both one and distinctly theirs, a bond that extends past their creative endeavours, despite it also being a catalyst for them as well.

“It’s important to work with someone who you can vibe really well with and who you share mutual respect with because the project is not all about one person or the other,” said Yappel. “It’s a shared experience. 

“Even when we are working on music separately, we still will piece it together, give feedback, be open to ideas, and accept that whatever is going to be made is going to sound good because you trust one another. It helps to have similar taste in music. It’s nearly impossible to share a music project equally when you let your ego take over. That’s why I love that we share so much input in each song. Neither one of us is the ‘lead.’”

The leadoff track, “idk,” is childish and playful paired with a deep bassline. “moon landing” sounds new world-ish with its sublime bedtime aura. “without me” is reminiscent of the space funk most aptly conjured up by the Austin trio Khurangbin. “tu me plais,” one of the duo’s earliest works, feels like the song that best captures the group’s musical ethos. It also is the song most rooted in the house music vibe sprinkled throughout all of these tracks. chomp! closes out the album with a more sullen cover of the Ashnikko and Grimes song “Cry.” While most of the tracks contain hardly any lyrics, the diversity of emotional energy consistent throughout speaks for itself. 

The soaring guitars that take center stage near the ends of tracks like “idk” and “tu me plais” call back to the moody overtones Cleveland rapper Kid Cudi attempted to paint on Man On The Moon 2. When you hear it, it’s almost like the track is getting a whole new life or is being followed up by a grimier remix of itself. Over the 15-minute chomp! EP, worlds are created within worlds, as are songs within songs, as the group experiments with tapping into their emotions sonically. The video teasers and live streams the group entertained over Instagram throughout the pandemic—riding the hype of recent house shows and not losing total sight of the project despite the creative vacuum caused by the pandemic—gave fans a better look of a quarantine-era bedroom studio setup. Not only was this an adorable look at their gear but also a lens into a room where almost all of the duo’s creative energy is being tapped into and explored. This vulnerability isn’t always accessible in a studio setting, and chomp! displayed that wonderfully on its debut EP.

Follow chomp! on Instagram.