DRENCH FRIES is the project of 18-year-old Levi Nattrass, a multi-instrumentalist and producer from San Diego who’s currently based in Massachusetts. The seemingly auto-biographical “Snow in April: The Sad Tale of a California Boy in a Massachusetts World” is the project’s debut single, a homesick yearning produced and mixed by Nattrass in his dorm room. He describes the effort as “a beachy, lo-fi pop tune about growing up, missing home, and being really, really cold.”
In that sense, the track’s journey is very impressive – the first 01:30 showing a more barren soundscape of creaking acoustics and sporadic keys, reminiscent of a chilly winter, and afterward an eruption of sun-swept key arpeggios, harmonious surf-pop vocal interweaving, and anthemic percussive clashing – what one would expect from the California summer in audible form. Conjuring a naturalistic yet still constantly evolving hybrid of indie-folk spearheaded by names like Neutral Milk Hotel, Nattrass crafts an impressive sound and state-hopping journey of his own with DRENCH FRIES.
