Vents MagaZine Music and Entertainment Magazine
Related Articles
There is something faintly disorienting about hearing a voice so young narrate emotional aftershocks usually reserved for people with longer histories and shorter illusions. Jake Murdoch, a teenager who has already accumulated the résumé of a mid-career professional, approaches pop music not as a diary but as a stage on which feeling is arranged, lit, and given its best angle. Next is a prime example: a song about romantic misalignment that moves with the brisk confidence of someone who suspects heartbreak is survivable and therefore singable. The track opens on a syncopated chassis—guitars flicker, drums keep their clever appointments—and from there it proceeds with a kind of aerodynamic optimism. Murdoch understands the physics of hooks: how long to hold a note, when to release a melody into the listener’s care. The chorus lifts, not like a rocket but like a well-timed thought, inevitable once introduced. Lyrically, he circles the modern paradox of intimacy: closeness haunted by exit strategies. Lines about running, staying, thinking, replaying—these are the verbs of contemporary courtship, where love is both pursuit and retreat. The reference to calling the police lands less as literal drama than as adolescent hyperbole, the language of a generation raised on extremes of expression. What complicates the story is Murdoch’s proficiency. Sixteen instruments, international showcases, collaborations with industry elders—these could easily calcify into precocity. Yet Next resists that fate. The vocal is warm and unarmoured; it does not posture. He sings as though persuasion still matters, as though the beloved might actually be listening. Perhaps that is the quiet charm here. In an era of irony and algorithm, Murdoch offers sincerity with craft. The song glows with the belief that feeling deeply is not an embarrassment but a skill. Next suggests a young artist already fluent in the grammar of pop but still discovering its literature. The result is a buoyant, well-cut vignette of longing—youthful, yes, but not trivial. Pop, after all, has always thrived on the brave art of caring too much.
