“Pitched as ‘avante hyperpop’, her music can sound like what Mariah Carey might cook up if she spent more hours hanging out in video arcades and reading radical literature.”
Meljoann has dined in Prince’s inner sanctum. She has drank from the teacup of Lady Gaga, and worn Rick James’s lightning-bolt suits. I’m sure these things are true. How else do you explain her ability to produce such bold, confident pop music?
The maverick multi-instrumentalist abandoned Dublin in 2012 after the double blow of losing her job and home. She may or may not still be living in Brighton – recent details of her movements are scant, and her online presence is severely limited. Such elusiveness is unusual for the artist in the depths of an album cycle: Meljoann’s third and most recent full-length, Status, only dropped last month. If this exciting, kaleidoscopic effort is a map, then she is actually residing somewhere between Pluto and Paisley Park.
Pitched as “avante hyperpop”, her music can sound like what Mariah Carey might cook up if she spent more hours hanging out in video arcades and reading radical literature. There’s a confidence and conviction to Meljoann’s glam-slam that never turns to bluster; her pop music chops run counter to a seemingly lack of interest in pop stardom. To choose analogues that are not Janet Jackson, the artist she is most often compared to, then Janelle Monaé’s alien freak-nik comes to mind. But it’s also impossible not to think of Backstreet Boys when Meljoann is cooing “bye, bye, bye, bye” in a song about big tech, of which she is a dedicated sceptic.
I’ve known of local bands who’ve entered the studio fully intending on producing grandiose, dancefloor-filling pop albums. Whether it’s the restrictions of budget, limited technology, or maybe just the lack of knowhow, they discovered it’s an incredibly hard discipline. Meljoann wins by indulging in melodic excess. She has an uncanny knack for getting her music to sound colossal, stuffing melodies in spaces other artists couldn’t even identify, adding sparkle to every crevasse.
Her career has been, it’s fair to say, fractured. Debut album Squick dropped all the way back in 2010. Heavily influenced by the obscure Scandinavian micro-genre known as skweee music, the LP is full of spacey Casio riffs and video game grooves with occasional hits of chaos and distortion, the pop star within Meljoann bursting to escape. The soulful harmonies of “Private World” form a gripping pastiche of 2000s chart R&B. Most striking is “So Academic”, a song built around an underlying electro stutter reminiscent of Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” before being washed with waves of synths that give the song a feeling that it’s been warped by the sun.
The album was a thrilling statement, yet a decade of musical darkness followed. I know little of Meljoann’s journeys during this period other than it appears that life simply got in their way.
The comeback proved as inspired as it was long-awaited. In 2021, Meljoann released her follow up album H.R. It expanded on the formula in a multitude of ways; a brash, bright bop with Brooklyn art rock fantasies and a strong anti-capitalist bent. The beats hit harder than before – there was the brilliant new jack swing homage “O Supervisor”. And with Meljoann’s voice louder in the mix, their personality came through more clearly. “This wage-slave shit is getting wack,” she declares on the layered R&B of “Overtime”, a signature single.
Building on those victories, new album Status is a phantasmagoria of colorful sounds and daring experiments. Meljoann’s decade-long drive towards retro R&B perfection culminates in “Secrets”, a song that’s a couple years old now but a welcome inclusion nonetheless. In contrast, “Run” features a more grinding, devious electro-thump beat. Meljoann’s penchant for huge hooks and epic guitar solos are displayed on the synth dreamworld “Data Ghost”, while “ESC” is a salacious Aaliyah-esque ballad. “I wanna feel it’s mine/ That I can stroke that skin,” she sings softly. “That we got time/ We wanna get inside.”
Thematically, the album follows on from Meljoann’s recent criticisms of the tech industry. Last October, she posted what was dubbed her “manifesto”, an attack on “Big Social” and its overbearing influence on our lives and art. “Under capitalism,” she wrote, “our joyful work – art, community, coding – is done under the shadow of poverty and burnout.”
Meljoann’s songwriting has the same inclinations. Her lyrics are often short and abstract, but there’s no need to decipher a line like, “Your billions never worth our life,” on the song “Run”. Elsewhere, “Data Ghost”, which she has described as “a song about slipping through the cracks in the algorithm”, builds a sense of falling into digital purgatory – a geometric void of pixelated hour glasses as rigid as desks and cubicles in a drab, identity-stripping office space.
There’s an inherent tension between the music and message here: Meljoann’s idea of a computerised dystopia is presented over glorious electro soundscapes and sticky-icky hooks. But the contradiction is entirely appropriate. Those with prominent digital lives rely on vibrancy and glamour. Instagram and so on encourages invention and framing, both core tenets of pop performance. For Meljoann, it’s nothing but delusion and wish-fulfilment, and nobody can convince her otherwise.
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