Rollin Hunt announces debut LP on Moniker Records, releases first track “Beautiful Park”

Fans of Rollin‘s far-out R&B (“Unearthly shoo-be-doo,” Jessica Hopper has called it) know him as a lo-fi underdog, an oddly-charming savant who recorded some of his best material on an answering machine. But The Phoney, his first real LP, finds Rollin working it in panoramic, technicolor hi-fi that’s light years from the bedroom studio. The not-so-secret weapon is whiz-kid producer and multi-instrumentalist Doni Schroader, who worked for months with Rollin in manic, all-night studio binges, bringing his songs to lush and lavish life. The gorgeous production that emerged from that west-side Chicago warehouse–jaw-dropping orchestral arrangements and pyrotechnic studio wizardry, an awesome synthesis of organic and electric that’s both warm and futuristic–is as inventive as anything this side of Frank Ocean, with whom The Phoney shares a kind of Tumblr-era sense of digital melancholy.