Kid Froopy just wants to connect with you. The rest—the money, the fame, the celebrity—takes a backseat. "The career stuff is definitely a very secondary thing for me," Froopy (aka Sam) tells me after I observe that most of what's been written about the 27-year-old singer, songwriter, and producer from Des Moines, Iowa, focuses on how he's flying under the radar and on the brink of breaking big. "What really turns me on still is the music itself," he says, "and we’re in a cultural moment where maybe that stuff is harder to talk about or engage with."
So, let's talk about Kid Froopy's music. It's electronic and danceable, but it's not EDM. He's worked with everyone from Zeds Dead to Terror Jr and Carly Rae Jepsen. He's unclassifiable in the most genuine sense of the word. What can be said is Kid Froopy is a bop master in the making, which, according to him, is definitely different than, say, a banger-maker. "A bop is a little more low-key," he says, which is true; a bop will never let you down.
For Froopy, the internet was and is his gateway to a world of genres and their respective bops. He experiences most of what he makes through a computer screen, having had his first-ever studio session this past year with Terror Jr. Like so much of internet blogging, "music is my way of expressing the emotions that maybe I don’t feel perfectly capable of doing in my real life," Froopy says. "Or it’s a way to move through stuff. At the same time, that stuff can get kind of tiresome, and sometimes it’s just fun to write music for the sake of doing it and have it be breezy or fun." Hence the name Kid Froopy. "I think I can be a little self-serious at times," he explains, "and having such a dumb artist name helps to remind me to just chill the fuck out some of the time."
Froopy takes his work very seriously, though. His new song, "New You," which we're premiering today, is a rework of an older song of his called "All I See Is You." Because art is never truly finished, Froopy went back to the track and rejiggered it after the record label, Deadbeats, asked him to release it. He says, "I ended up taking elements of that song and sort of reimagined it, thinking about where I was when writing the song originally and then coming back to it maybe a year later and updating it, like I was speaking to that version of myself in the past." For what it's worth, "New You" is a tender post-breakup song that glides through those big "what if" questions of how your life may have turned out if you never met that certain someone. Though sad, Kid Froopy's signature is never to wallow and instead, pepper that emotion with bright, bubbling electronics. Kid Froopy connection: made.
"New You" is lifted off Kid Froopy's forthcoming Drive Slow EP, out October 20 via Deadbeats.
