Alan Palomo and His Revivalist Rebellion

For better or for worse, 2023 was the year of comebacks. With Harrison Ford returning as Indiana Jones, an unfortunate Willy Wonka revival and an unlikely Beatles reunion, Alan Palomo—the artist formerly known as Neon Indian—returned as a more original version of himself. In a time where marketability and virality are plaguing a music industry that is more capitalistic than ever before, the Mexican-American singer/songwriter looked towards the past to capture the essence of elusive artists and see where the roots of capitalism began to grow. World Of Hassle, Palomo’s first album under his own name, is the retrospective of a musician who has watched the industry of his passion morph into a beast he’s unsure he wants to partake in.

At 35, Palomo has always operated on the fringes. Born too late for the ’80s sophisti-pop renaissance, he began perfecting his chillwave sound right as the so-called Blog Era ended. After eight years of figuring out what was next, he looked to those bygone times he didn’t have a chance to make music during. In all honesty, World Of Hassle could have easily been titled Alan Palomo’s Magical Mystery Tour: ‘80s Pop Edition, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it—and it would probably be a copyright issue. However, in essence, that is what the album is all about—bringing the influences of other countries’ musical niches, like French boogie or Brazilian electro-funk, together. Artfully including those influences in an American record is a breath of fresh air to the indie pop scene that Palomo has been operating in for years.

Much of World Of Hassle is rooted in memory, and delving into music’s past has brought Palomo to a place where he is exploring his own history as well via his brother’s newfound passion for digitizing old family VHS tapes. “There was a memory that was very pleasant, but for some reason, I just started weeping—it was just the nostalgia of it,” Palomo tells me. “My dad was walking around the apartment filming every little knick-knack, and my brother was on an acoustic guitar. He’s trying to figure out the chords to a Foo Fighters song. I wander over to my dad and ask, ‘What are you doing?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, just, you know, filming everything.’ And I’m just like, ‘Huh. Why?’ And he’s like, ‘Well because one day you’ll want to remember,’ and when he said that, my brother and I started crying.”

Music has always been a family affair for Palomo; he was constantly surrounded by it growing up. His father was a crooner in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, put out a few albums and transitioned into being a club singer throughout Palomo’s youth. He even continues to gig around today. Palomo’s brother, Jorge Manuel Palomo, was the more musical of the siblings growing up, as he began playing guitar around age five. Palomo may not have been interested in creating music that young, but he was constantly immersed in it. World Of Hassle is the brothers’ first real delve into collaborating musically: While Palomo’s brother also played on Vega Intl. Night School, the blending of their collective tastes is far more present in a post-Neon Indian world that dares to boldly embody the best of those genres.

Time is such a fluid thing. As we get older, we tend to look back once the future becomes much more short-sighted than the past. World of Hassle is a love affair of Palomo’s journey through time, with music as the medium. It recalls past eras through memory, sonic textures and pop culture references. For something that started as a challenge to make an album that his fans hadn’t heard him do before, Palomo approached it with a musical curiosity. Following in the footsteps of many great rockstars who abandoned their bands to focus on a solo career, Palomo shed the Neon Indian moniker to find a spark of intrigue from one of the album’s inspirations—Leonard Cohen. “I was thinking, ‘Have you wondered what would happen if you tried to commit yourself to writing a song the way that Leonard Cohen does?’ Meaning a consideration for the lyrics and then arranging around the vocals and the song’s concept. Instead of making the synth-heavy thing, and then just singing on top of it—just finding space where I can write a verse or a chorus,” he says.

“As I get older, I gravitate towards nerdy or softer sounds like Prefab Sprout and Blue Nile. So this was, for better or worse, my love letter to that and more of a songwriting, truth-driven record, more so than kind of like starting from beats and textures,” Palomo continues. “But that’s not to say that I wouldn’t go back to making more textural music or find some hybrid of the two. To grow musically, you have to go out on these rhizomatic tangents to get out of your own wheelhouse.”

With each of World Of Hassle’s musical references, Palomo dives further into the ‘80s atmosphere his work so boldly represents. The decade is, undoubtedly, one of the most influential decades for everything from film to fashion to tech to music. Yet the ‘80s obsession has always puzzled me—this coming from a twenty-something ‘80s revivalist. What is it about the ‘80s that is so alluring that we are constantly looking back for inspiration? Once again, I’m drawn in by a piece of art inspired by the infamous decade. However, there is something fresh about the influences Palomo pulls from that time period, and that is where his infinite curiosities come in. “As I dive deeper into the genres I’m interested in, it’s hard to get out of the ‘80s,” he notes. “In the sense of when I think I listened to everything there was to listen to with electro-funk or boogie, I realized Brazil was also doing it, or France was doing it.”

However, this idea of reaching back into the past for inspiration becomes a slippery slope of copying what you hear rather than making something fresh. We’ve all heard shitty revivalist groups that are practically cover bands, and Palomo wanted to make sure he didn’t fall into the category of being a cheap reproduction of the classics. “The issue is never to get lost in the pantomiming of another era. [World Of Hassle] sounded a little bit more straight in that I wanted to play around with minimalism and reverbs—but in terms of how you play the game between the past and the present is in the lyrics,” he explains. Palomo hits the mark out of the gate with “The Wailing Mall,” which is a call back to ‘80s mall culture and how a younger version of himself was trying to navigate the explosion of American society being wrapped up in a homogenous culture.

In another effort to capture the era without subverting it too much, Palomo toyed with his other passion: old-school production equipment, and it’s an odd time in history when we are not too far away from these “antiquated” technologies to be able to integrate them into a modern system. “Almost as a creative challenge, I took like a shitty $500 Casio keyboard that had a really powerful synth engine in it that no one really is aware of, and I hooked it up to an editor on my computer—which you would not have been able to do back in the ‘80s or ‘90s,” Palomo says. “I started manipulating the machine to give me some of the elements of the pastiche of those textures but then did something completely new with them. I try to have some creative prompt that’s creating something that may be drawing in boards from those eras, but is creating something that would not have existed.”

The mad scientist’s musical ideas don’t end there. “It’s funny, I had this experiment where I hadn’t seen this weird Ridley Scott movie from the ‘80s called Black Rain with Michael Douglas,” Palomo continues. “He plays this cop who has to go undercover. I just looked at the poster of him with a cool jacket and aviators on with Tokoyo in the background, and I was just like, ‘Why don’t you write an instrumental track that you imagine the soundtrack of this movie to sound like? So I wrote it. And then I went to watch the movie, and I was like, ‘Damn, I wasn’t that far.’ Basically, like Hans Zimmer doing a Ryuichi Sakamoto impersonation.”

In Palomo’s opinion, a special kind of alignment of a heightened, sensationalized culture and access to art makes people, including himself, yearn for the ‘80s. “I think there’s a specific nostalgia about it, because it was the first real explosion of monoculture,” he explains. “Everybody was watching the same movies and, suddenly, people were going to the movies in a way they hadn’t before, like with Spielberg. It’s connected to all our childhoods because, you know, who didn’t see E.T. when they were a kid? Some of it was the reinventing of form regarding how to make a popular film. But also, I think that it’s because there was this explosion of skill meets technology.”

World Of Hassle is a balancing act between leaning into high-tech production with manufactured sounds and the limitations of a completely analog recording process. Palomo finds his niche right in the middle, claiming to be neither an analog purist nor a futurist. He spent years perfecting production-heavy sounds with Neon Indian and has taken a different approach with his new solo work. “Previously, the records were made in this vacuum of synth land and messing with samples,” he says. “And, funnily enough, the songs from the first record—at least up until this tour because I kind of reinterpreted them—were the least fun to perform because I was literally just playing over samples,” he explained. “It’s funny because James Murphy had this line that I read a decade ago, and it stuck with me, but he basically says you have to become the best cover band of your own album.”

“But this time around—I think because I was inspired by watching concert films from Sade, around the Diamond Life era, or Roxy Music during Avalon—it was made with that intention to take on the road eventually,” Palomo continues. This new version of himself is endeared by the simplicity of just being good at playing your instrument. It’s almost a lost art these days. Artists are ebbing and flowing with what is dominating the industry. “It’s like that LCD song, ‘Losing my Edge.’ It’s like, I heard you’re selling your guitars, and you’re buying turntables later. I heard you sold your turntables to buy guitars. These things are always in flux, you know,” Palomo explains. Artists have to choose if they want to keep up with the times or if they want to stay true to what they love, and sometimes that choice comes down to dollar signs.

With technology at an all-time high and having access to all recorded history right at our fingertips, young people continue to look backward for creative inspiration. However, the space between the past and present is collapsing. For Palomo, who created his first record on the tail end of the now revered (or marred, depending on the listener) “indie sleaze” movement, only to have it start blowing up again as he reinvents himself feels like a vortex of cultures collapsing in on itself. This is why he has detached from the world of what’s trendy in an effort to challenge himself to make music he never has before. In a period of history when value is derived from virality, it seems like the only way you can see yourself grow without selling out is to find internal curiosities to build on because the zeitgeist has shifted to trends in a way that even the ‘80s can’t—and could never—compete with.

“I hope we hit a critical mass point where we realize that we’re oversaturated, and we’re not latching on to anything in any meaningful way. We’re starting to treat these gestures of the artists we love—made to capture your attention—flippantly,” Palomo explains. “Generationally, it’s like, how do you tell a fish what water is? If you grew up in that fast-paced environment, your attention span might be inherently shorter. I hope we get some weird come-to-Jesus moment where we’re like, ‘Is this the future we want to build?’ It’s like some crazy roller coaster ride. It’s just getting faster, and I think many people are jumping off the ride.”

Music fanatics will still commit to listening to whatever their favorite artists put out. Still, the casual listener is just being fed shorter and shorter pieces of music with TikTok at the forefront. In this new technological landscape, people want to be spoon fed content more than ever. Musicians, however, are seeing a cheapening of their art. Watching a slice of a song be taken out of its carefully placed spot on an album and be fashioned into a TikTok trend is frustrating. It used to be “songs of the summer” and now it’s becoming “songs of the second.” People are becoming impatient, and artists have to make music quicker than ever.

“I find it both fascinating, and a little frightening, how one is supposed to keep up in that ecosystem,” Palomo admits. “It brings about this broader conversation of how you’re supposed to keep that kind of output up if you care about what you’re making deeply because, with World Of Hassle, it took me two years to make that album. It was a very heartfelt, slow-cooked meal that I wanted to serve my fans for being so patient and waiting eight years for a record. But now, coming back to this whole different industry, if I had to give a forecast and what I think the next model people will have to follow—music is more personality-driven. It’s just becoming names and having an online personality and people that are engaging on camera. I cringe at that because it’s more about the parasocial obsession with the person.”

The new obsession with what’s next and feigned interpersonal connection with celebrities being at the forefront is disheartening to artists like Palomo, who pour their hearts into an album just for one or two songs to hit the masses on a significant level. The album cycle has been flipped on its head, with single culture ruling the masses like it previously did in the ‘60s. Labels are feeding people pieces of the record ahead of time, and the big to-do is the record itself. With the impending capitalistic collapse bleeding into the music industry significantly, where do artists fit in? How do they survive financially without giving way to the masses clamoring for these small, easily digestible media pieces? This isn’t a new phenomenon. We saw a miniature version of it happen in the ‘80s, and maybe that is why Palomo was so drawn to the era for inspiration: He can see the same loss of artist agency happening again 40 years later.

“The problems we had then and the problems we have now in history, unfortunately, are doomed to repeat themselves constantly,” he admits. “So why not wear the Claude Montana suit from that era and croon about our modern afflictions? It just makes sense. There is a lot of lore in the World Of Hassle vinyl that [cover artist] Robert Beatty and I kind of geek out about—but it was just to create this alternate universe of the present that is this funhouse mirror of what we’re actually stuck in. Like everybody during the pandemic, I felt like something else was in control of my life. And I wasn’t in on the joke.”

Despite his clear observations of how the industry is running these days and the impending doom of creativity, Palomo is ready to keep his slow and steady pace. “I kept joking with my friends that by the time I finished the next album, it would be like the end of Interstellar. Everyone’s died, and it’s a whole new generation of people. Then the label head is just an AI representation of himself,” he says. Luckily for Palomo, he got into the industry before the madness and can now stay within his bubble of fans who are just curious to see what he has to say about the state of the world.

“As far as the stuff that fascinates me—as far as the kind of music I want to make and what I’m excited to make next—I think it just has to stay steadfast and true,” he insists. “Your fans aren’t dumb. If you start playing a cynical game with them, they’ll eventually lose interest or feel betrayed. That’s definitely not something I have any intention of doing. I’m just going to start chipping away at the next record. I have other projects I’m doing, but there is an EP that I could probably put out of what’s left from World Of Hassle—songs that I wanted on the record, but they just didn’t fit the sequence. But otherwise, I’m trying to get back to the studio and start thinking about what to do next.”

These days, the best way to rebel against the system is to stick to what you are passionate about. World Of Hassle is a portrait of Palomo researching and absorbing the intricacies of his favorite artists for years, tracking down old tech and channeling his inner Leonard Cohen. What came from those countless hours of dedication is something only a student of these bygone eras could capture the essence of with a sultry swagger, as Palomo did on his own revivalist album. I think that’s what makes World of Hassle so special: It takes you someplace else—a neon-doused noir city that you can aimlessly walk around in, getting up to trouble, falling in love or just playing music in a hazy club for no one in particular.