Earlier this month prolific multi-instrumentalist Nnamdi Ogbonnaya told MTV News that his new album, Drool (Sooper/Father Daughter), is his first indebted to his experience in Chicago, the city that’s come to represent home despite his lack of a deep emotional attachment to it. “I don’t think I feel that way about any place particularly,” Ogbonnaya said. “It’s just the people I’ve met make it worth staying here.” His music reflects his relationships to his physical surroundings and creative community; he collaborates with circles of musicians in punk, postrock, hardcore, and hip-hop groups, but it’s in his solo work that he’s most free-floating and unmoored as an artist. On the succinct, clear-headed Drool, Ogbonnaya corrals his musical foibles and vocal gestures while managing to retain exciting pop excesses in the process, piling on sounds that herk and jerk and directing every bleep, blop, and bloop toward moments of unexpected euphoria. He packs melodic loops into every nook of the carnival kawaii-funk single “Let Go of My Ego,” his vacillating vocals lighting off bottle rockets till the track’s dwindling moments. v
