Tyler Kershaw has created music under the moniker Funeral Advantage over the last six years, and the Massachusetts native has built a loyal fan base with his honest lyrics and dreamy production. But as he began making his latest album, Nectarine — premiering on Billboard today (Feb. 21) — Kershaw realized that being so vulnerable was actually taking a toll on him.
“I was having a hard time relating to my previous output,” the singer says in a statement. “I wanted to make art about things other than myself and my experiences.”
The result of that revelation was a collection of seven songs where Kershaw played narrator rather than the lead character. Nectarine is focused on the idea of balancing a mentally sound personal life and the facade people oftentimes put on for others, soundtracked by airy melodies and bright beats reminiscent of ’80s power-pop.
Though Kershaw’s voice is still hauntingly subdued amid Nectarine‘s echoing production, each song is noticeably more upbeat than Funeral Advantage’s past material: tracks such as “Black House” and “Take Me Down” follow in the danceable footsteps of the album’s lead single “Peach Nectarine,” and even the more downtempo moments like “Bad Magnet” introduce heavier electric guitar than past Funeral Advantage tunes. The album’s positive sound mirrors the change Kershaw was looking to make with his new approach, which in turn resulted in an evolution for Funeral Advantage as a whole.
“As the listener, I don’t think anyone cared besides me what the songs were actually about,” he suggests. “But the end result [of Nectarine] ended up coming out sounding peculiar to me, just due to the way I framed what I was writing about. This album, at once, sounds both very much like a Funeral Advantage album, and also nothing like a Funeral Advantage album to me.”
Kershaw enlisted good friends to help record and give feedback on Nectarine, which he says has helped Funeral Advantage evolve into something he never thought it would. “The sounds on this album illustrate that growth perfectly,” he adds. “I listen back on these songs and hear something worth returning to.”
Nectarine is officially available tomorrow (Feb. 22) on Sleep Well Records, but you can get a first listen on Billboard below.