Blend

When he’s not making absolute bangers Reilly is always working towards shaping the foundations of his promising career — by means of exploring unfamiliar territory and finding inspiration in something as simple as a mattress on the side of the road.

Read our exclusive interview with LoveLeo below.

First of all, where are you at the moment and how is it there?

I'm in my studio space at home in Los Angeles! It's a beautiful overcast day, I just did some yoga with my girlfriend and we lit some Palo Santo wood, so the whole house smells really good and I’m feeling at peace, just good in general, I haven’t eaten anything yet but that's next on the to-do list!

We’re in the middle of a pandemic, yet you somehow managed to write, record and plan these brilliant releases. How did our current situation affect you as an artist?

At the beginning of quarantine there was a lot of uncertainty on whether it was going to last a whole year and if tours could happen. I was actually about to go on my first tour and I had been practicing for months, but then covid hit really hard. Which sucked because I love performing, I did a lot of plays when I was younger and I was also in orchestra so I have a real desire to get out there and perform. I know it’ll happen eventually and everything happens for a reason, but I had to recalibrate what I was going to do so I did a music video in my apartment which was really fun. Then I did some soul searching in the next few months and tried to figure out who I am, where I’m at in life, the kind of music that I wanna be making and then ease back into it and now I feel like I’m in the best position ever. I’m making the exact music that I wanna make that I’m incredibly excited about and I’ve found a great group of people to surround myself with. It sucks, I really wish that I could’ve gone on that tour but at the same time the tour will always happen and I learned some very valuable things about myself over the course of this pandemic.

Your new song “buzzcut” is a very radical style shift to a more hyperpop sound, what inspired this?

When I was first coming up and building a fan-base, I got very tied into the persona that I created with the crazy outfits, crazy edits, all sorts of photoshop stuff. I love doing that but I kind of set up a precedent for myself where everything had to meet that standard of; In your face wowness and I just found myself doing a lot of things for the sake of posting what I thought would needed to be posted, as opposed to doing something that would be reflective of who I am. Throughout my life I’ve developed a lot very quickly, like I’ll go for one look and then on to the next thing because I like to keep it interesting and explore different parts of myself and find different ways that I can represent myself. So this shift is just another evolution in who I am, I just didn’t wanna get tied to that one version of myself that I had shown to everyone over the internet. I’m grateful that everyone enjoys the crazy edits and the crazy outfits and everything but theirs different layers of myself so I wanted to strip back everything that I had built up persona wise and kind of just be like, this is me, this is what I’m doing now. As far as doing digital glitch core, like, fucked up kind of music, I always just wanna be making the music that excites me and for a while, Indie pop and bedroom pop was extremely cutting to me. The DIY aspect of it, everything about it I loved and as an artist I just wanted to open up and show that I have a very wide range of sounds that I can explore and genres I can make and so this kind of music is what’s exciting me right now and I’m so happy with it.

The narrative that surrounds your music and the lyrics you come up with are utterly relatable. What does your writing process look like?

It can be different from song to song, but recently I’ve been finding that lyrics and concepts have been coming to me rather than me seeking it out. I was actually just driving the other day and there was a mattress propped up on the side of the street and it had "kneel in the mud next to me" written on it and I thought that was so awesome, I had to write it down, it was almost as if it were there for a reason. Then I went into the studio and made this awesome song with that as part of the bridge. I’ve been picking up on things in life and exploring why I even picked up on it and what I connect with, I just make music that I like and music that is reflective of who I am and if it connects with people then that's always the best case scenario.

You’ve mentioned that what you do on social media is strictly for social media. What do you find yourself doing when you disconnect from all of that? Does it ever disrupt your creative process?

Yeah, anytime you’re putting something out on the internet there's always a bit of uncertainty and a bit of, for me, especially when I’m in the middle of a change or trying something new there's a little bit of a time period where you have to get comfortable with it and explore. Really just trying to get comfortable with who you are in that moment and I feel like I’m in a really good spot now and the internets a fucking scary place, but we all live there especially because of this past year. I feel like every body is very much on the internet and so now it’s just a test of seeing how people will adjust. Like, for me, figuring out how I wanna exist on the internet is something that I feel like everybody has to go through. Or you can just unplug your phone, delete your shit and live on a farm, that’s like the end goal for me atleast.

Do you feel close to your audience ? Have you found a way to keep the connection alive without live gigs or meetups ?

I mean the barrier that I’m still waiting to break through is doing live shows because then I can really meet people. Like, sometimes I’ll go through my dm’s and have conversations with people and that’s awesome, but it’s not the same as meeting someone and feeling what their energy is like and seeing their face. But that’s just something that I’m missing in general. My fanbase aside, I just wanna see peoples faces again and I know live shows will do that so that's the final frontier for me, is doing live shows and meeting people. 

I absolutely adore your style. Does your music have an influence on the way that you present yourself or vice-versa?

100%! You know I feel like its more the vice versa, it’s more how I represent myself, and then that's translated into my music and yeah it’s fun, like when I’m putting together an outfit that I normally wouldn’t wear or like an outfit that feels like another person's outfit. It’s a really fun thing to do because it puts me in a different mind set! So whether I’m making a song or a video I can explore that from a slightly different perspective or just think like if I was a different person, how would I approach this or what would I do, so yeah, they’re definitely intertwined. 

So, like an alter ego thing?  

Yeah, but the thing with alter egos is that I feel like the way I do it is more so like characters or parts of myself, rather than it being a whole separate version of me. It’s more so little parts of myself that I then choose to expand on.

If COVID didn’t exist, would Buzzcut sound totally different?

Yeah, when covid started I had already put out my EP, the songs on that were songs that I had already recorded prior to covid and for the most part theirs a lot of different genres and sounds on that Ep but I would say the majority was that dream-pop and indie DIY kind of genre and I feel like covid, forming me to develop and take some time to figure out who I am, that definitely had something to do with me switching genres. So yeah, short answer is no without covid I don’t think I would’ve been making the music that I am now.

What are the next steps in you? And can you tell us more about the central themes of your upcoming project?

Yeah, so Buzz Cut is linked to Tung-tied, which is the next song that I have coming out. The buzzcut video is in essence, me getting ready, me getting prepared for the Tung-tied video so they’re linked in that way. I used to put a snippet of the next video at the end of whatever music video I had just put out but what I’m trying to do now is explore a narrative that can cross through the videos themselves as opposed to them just being tagged on at the end. I’m just exploring how social media has affected me as well as the journey that I’ve gone on in the last year and half to become who I am now and the ups and downs. There's a lot of low points but a lot of high points as well, so I’m just trying to figure out how i can take those and write them into music and then present them in a way that's true to me.