In all manners of expression, I consider myself a chronic perfectionist - and for that reason alone, this sentence has always given me the most trouble. The first sentence is perhaps the most key factor in commanding attention and promoting understanding, and when the perceived stakes are so high, I cannot help but slave away until I am sure that the sentence before me is the best possible way to introduce my subject and the discussion that follows. This fixation is only made worse because I am typically tasked with introducing and vouching for relatively unknown artists to a broader audience on the basis of their merit as an artist - and that’s quite a lot to fit in just one sentence.
Don’t be fooled - this is no humble brag, nor is this an attempt at sympathy. Hell, this introduction was just as hard to write as any other introduction I’ve drafted in the past - but this is no typical article. This time, I have the great honor of introducing an artist who is no stranger to the public eye - an artist who has already proved his merit hundreds of thousands of times over.
If it wasn’t obvious yet, I’m talking about funeral - a mainstay act in the scene for years now, funeral (who will interchangeably be referred to as Izzy throughout this article) has recently laid a definitive claim to a seat at the table of artists who will lead the current generation and inspire the next. In the past year alone, Izzy has more than tripled his growth in monthly listeners on Spotify, and can now boast a respectable following of nearly 20,000 followers on his SoundCloud account. Furthermore, fans received “superplastic” in July in early celebration of hitting 10,000 followers on the artist’s Instagram account, to which the album garnered rave reviews and an overwhelmingly positive reception upon release.
It should be clear now that funeral has cemented himself as a potential heir to the throne, and has rightfully earned command of a near cult-like fanbase. Opportunities like this do not present themselves frequently, so I want to make the most of this chance to pick Izzy’s brain, and truly examine how exactly they reached this point and what all of it means for their career, in the present and future tense. Before I can do that, I’d first like to preface this examination by discussing a staple that has been present throughout funeral’s career and discography.
Just as funeral is no stranger to scrutiny of the public eye, I am no stranger to funeral’s immense body of work. Ever since discovering Izzy’s music for myself, it always struck me that this was an artist who excels in executing their creative vision in a very cohesive and concise manner. Look no further than funeral’s most recent releases to understand my reasoning behind this sentiment - the triplet singles “NO RUSSIAN”, “HELL 2”, and “UNIMPORTANT” maintain visual consistency through the cover art and a cohesive creative vision behind the sonics throughout each song.
As I began to research and prepare material for my interview with Izzy, this quality I had admired for so long at face value started to intrigue me much more. The various pieces of information I had gleaned from past articles and interviews lead me to believe that the manner in which Izzy digests art and artistic inspirations are fundamental to his repeated success in executing cohesive creative visions.
After combing through all my research, I was able to clearly distinguish three formative moments where an evolution in funeral’s artistic vision was caused by an external artistic influence. First, Izzy himself points to a moment in 2015, where his Twitter account at the time was suspended. This provided Izzy with the rare opportunity of a fresh start, and after taking cues from musical inspirations like Xavier Wulf and Night Lovell, this was the birth of the artist we now know as funeral and the beginning of Izzy’s exploration into a darker and edgier sound. Four years later, funeral’s sound again radically evolved, due to self-proclaimed inspiration from the Joker (2019) movie. Only after this did the majority of funeral’s music transition from simply dark to straight up evil. The last, and most recent, formative shift, came with the release of “superplastic”. Izzy’s main source of inspiration for the album came from a Funko Pop figurine produced by a company called Superplastic - I think it’s self-explanatory enough. All three of these formative moments were driven by three different mediums of art - auditory inspiration that caused a rebrand in sonics and persona, visual inspiration which refined this new sound, and physical inspiration that motivated their most recent album, which also serves as perhaps THE statement piece in funeral’s entire discography - and I think it’s important to understand that as Izzy’s sources of inspiration evolved and became more abstract, Izzy’s sound itself simultaneously evolved and he was better able to translate more abstract inspirations into concrete yet conceptual music.
This ability to effortlessly execute a concise and cohesive vision and funeral’s unique manner of incorporating his inspirations in his own artwork seems to be one of the key reasons funeral has cemented his spot at the top of the scene and shows great potential to break into more mainstream spheres of the industry. Of course, variety and range are equally important for an artist’s longevity, but in order to be taken seriously when experimenting with new sounds, you must be able to execute these new directions with the same ease as you do with sounds that fall more into your comfort zone.
Izzy is not only able to execute every experimental vision at a steadily elevating skill floor, but is also able to deliver entire projects that are thematically and sonically consistent throughout. By and large, this tends to be one of the heaviest criticisms of artists at the forefront of the mainstream - and it gives me tremendous faith for Izzy’s future if he has already honed his skills to this point, especially this early in his career.
I don’t intend for my repeated mentions of Izzy’s maturation as an artist to paint a false image of where the artist’s career stands chronologically. Albeit the many years it took to reach this point, funeral’s career is still extremely young in the grand scheme of things. That isn’t to say that Izzy hasn’t come a long way either - it’s just clear that they still have a lot to offer and achieve before they’re done.
Rather, I wanted to highlight just how mature funeral’s artistry has become in the short timeframe it has taken to do so, relative to how long it can take so many other artists to achieve the same development in their own craft.
While many artists struggle to streamline their creative process and experiment with new sounds, funeral has had the amazing luck of beginning their pursuit of a musical career with great creative maturity. For lack of a better term, I’ve dubbed this creative maturity as the “IDGAF mindset”, and the manners in which this mindset has manifested have been a blessing for Izzy’s art, to say the least.
Perhaps most key to the aforementioned ability to flawlessly execute a creative vision is funeral’s approach to creating itself. Since the inception of his career in music, Izzy has preached a “copy and paste” approach in experimenting with new sounds. “That's usually how I go about doing a different kind of sound - so I first try to clone them, like one-to-one, but as usual, I kind of turn it into my own thing“. As simple and harmless as this approach is, it would not be unreasonable to say that this is not the most popular approach to music. Even personally, I tend to stray away from interpolating my inspirations directly, as it feels disingenuous to create something that I didn’t do entirely myself. Ignoring the fact that this is possibly an unhealthy mindset for creatives (our inspirations make us who we are and we should embrace that more often, but that’s a separate article entirely), I definitely am not alone in feeling this way.
Still - Izzy DGAF. Rather than feeling pressure from fellow artists to conform to a different creative approach, funeral has maintained this approach throughout his career. Because he keeps it simple and because he continues to refine his preferred way of experimentation, this IDGAF mindset and confidence in his individuality has only led to further maturation as both an artist and human within this industry.
This mindset has not only allowed Izzy to focus on himself and how he likes to work, it has also provided him with a fanbase that will consume anything he makes, regardless of genre, sound, or medium. “I was lucky enough to make the decision to post whatever I want early on so that I didn't have to go through, you know… It’s easier to make that decision in the past than it is sticking to one sound and having to want to make that decision when everybody knows you for a certain thing”. From the very beginning, funeral’s IDGAF mindset allowed him to release whatever he wanted to release without worrying whether his growing fanbase would listen or not - in fact, this semi-intentionally created a fanbase that isn’t built around the artist’s sound, but a fanbase that is built around the artist itself.
As his career has blossomed, it seems that this mindset has only strengthened alongside it. The bigger an artist’s following becomes, the more they are placed under scrutiny from the eyes of peers in the industry and people abroad, which only increases the pressure that some artists crack under. However, for funeral, his growth has only been more reason to be confident in himself and care less about how other people may react to him as a persona or an artist.
Despite all this, one thing has never changed - Izzy’s focus on steady rather than explosive growth. This too, is quite self-explanatory, but still speaks volumes to just how mature a creative funeral has been since his humble beginnings as an artist.
All in all, it’s evident that funeral is one of the most well-rounded artists pushing the boundaries of the underground sphere of music as we know it, and it’s no coincidence this is the case. One could call him blessed and diminish the thousands of hours that culminated in developing all of these characteristics, but none can dispute his destiny to claim his rightful spot on top.
In other news, funeral’s latest single, “fwu”, is now available to stream everywhere! You can check Izzy and his music out here.
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