Elijah Right?
ORIGINAL COWBOY MATERIAL
23rd May 2025
Approaching alternative electronic music through the lens of digital nostalgia, Ellesmere Port’s Elijah Right?’s 5 ST★R COWBOY feels a bit like listening to a lo-fi hip hop beats to study/relax to playlist after drinking three coffees on an empty stomach – this music is… chill… and yet… I’m overcome with an unidentifiable, jittery feeling of weirdness.
Within the mixtape’s glossy and pristine production is a zippy playfulness that bounces around via winding hyperpop melodies and 90s video game samples. Each track takes its own form to evoke a specific feeling somewhere between joy, wistfulness, excitement and unease. “TINY COWBOYS” fidgets like an overstimulated kid. “BACK RO★D” and “MOST W★NTED” are energetic and sharp, tied to spookier soundscapes such as “MINUTE x MINUTE” and “TYPE SH★T [bonus track]” through short ambient interludes. The mixtape’s highlight, “P★CHINKO” (which could be an 8-bit remix of a Mandy, Indiana track), interlaces the distant laughter of children with booming industrial beats.
It’s strange and indecipherable – though very fun and impressively produced. Themes of childhood nostalgia perceived through the adult world of dance music feels uncanny. Is it possible to make this kind of music without eeriness? The internet world Elijah Right? references is a now a digital wasteland, and 5 ST★R COWBOY is haunted by computer ghosts that died with the boom of social media – Microsoft Sam and BonziBuddy, chatting from beyond their Windows XP graves. There’s a specific alienation captured here that ties into the online obsession with liminal spaces, backrooms, dreamcore and those viral remixes of songs playing from another room – an elusive mood, alluring in its otherness but sickly in its familiarity.