Liam McCay Reassures Me It'll Be Okay

The prolific 18-year-old musician behind sign crushes motorist, Birth Day, hold, and more chats with me about his new album and his curious path to cult status

Back in May, Paste Magazine published my favorite piece of music writing I’ve done: a feature celebrating the 10 year anniversary of salvia palth’s melanchole in conversation with Daniel Johann Lines, the guy behind the viral sadness soundtrack. We chatted about cult internet fame, the trajectory of “bedroom pop,” and looked at the crop of young DIY musicians making music in the same tradition. They, too, are young artists fostering a kind of virality amongst themselves, uploading homespun albums, garnering thousands of streams, and networking with small tape labels to make limited-run merch before they’ve even played a show. They come from all over: mage tears is English, cottonwood firing squad is from California, and the person I’m chatting with, Liam McCay of sign crushes motorist, hails from Ireland.

When I chat with Liam, he’s in his bedroom, guitars in sight, as well as posters for My Bloody Valentine and Frank Ocean. At 18, he’s in the middle of his graduating exams, looking at the future and considering university while figuring out how to keep music a part of his life. It feels wild to know that the prolific emotional slowcore musician is such a young figure. While sign crushes motorist is his most-streamed project, garnering 1.3 million monthly Spotify listeners since he released i’ll be okay in August of 2022, Liam is the brain behind a variety of similar but subtly different projects that have also infiltrated the streaming economy. Projects like hold, miserable teens club, make his ribs show, take care, birth day, and more are finding their way onto Spotify editorial playlists, especially side effects, the dedicated sad indie playlist featuring everyone from DIY microcelebrities like Bedlocked and sundots to major acts like King Krule and boygenius. The Pinegrove song that just gained a new viral life, “Need 2,” has prominent placement.

I came of age on this kind of sad music. salvia palth and I are roughly the same age; we found ourselves drawn to, among other things, the music of people like Sam Ray and Mat Cothran. While their music is genuinely too different for direct comparison, I think they scratched a similar itch, picking at the scabs of extreme emotion and desolation with their distinctive approaches. For me and thousands of other teens like me, their music became a gateway to related artists of all kinds, like Foxes in Fiction (curator of Orchid Tapes), Nicole Dollanganger, Alex G, and even Mitski, who I saw open for Elvis Depressedly with Gabby’s World in 2015. At one level, it feels like “bedroom pop” is dead; the labels who dabbled in that sandbox like Double Double Whammy and Run For Cover have their new focal points, and the tape labels and blogs who specialized in these bedroom pop scenes have also drifted away, victims of their curators’ need to find a stable living. 

So when I found that young musicians still made trudging, nakedly emotional bedroom pop from home, uploaded it, and gained the admiration of thousands, sometimes millions of listeners worldwide, I realized that just because the labels and the blogs have moved on, it doesn’t mean that the listenership has. With new generations of indieheads who’ve had an expansive internet and a musical economy shaped extensively by the streaming era, and a network of like-minded tape labels like Gizzmoix, Hunkofplastic, Semi Collective, and more archiving the globalized digital scene, what we called “lo-fi bedroom pop” 10 years ago has a new life. And as we explore Liam’s latest album as sign crushes motorist, Hurting, we can see just how that has emerged for him.

Liam encountered bedroom pop and DIY production in 2019 and, like many, found himself inspired by the idea that moving, affecting indie music can rise from simple home production. As a younger teen, making music seemed an arduous process. It was revolutionary to realize that it doesn’t have to be. Towards the end of 2020, as he learned guitar, the world of slowcore hit Liam like a ton of bricks. The work of titans like Duster or the late Apistat Commander spoke to him both in how they made him feel and how their style sounded accessible, like something he might be able to replicate. A lot of bedroom pop starts out this way: a young fan with something to say finds an aesthetic they like and seeks to make it their own.

Liam found his preferred aesthetic on the internet, noting: “there’s not much of a slowcore scene in Ireland that I can think of.” He first heard Duster’s smash hit “Inside Out” while looking for some music to accompany an Instagram real, declaring: “this is class.” He listened to the growing Duster discography, moving on from there to Coma Cinema and Teen Suicide, and he freely, if sheepishly, admits to finding a breadth of slowcore favorites scrolling Tik Tok. Duster, especially, has become synonymous with slowcore thanks to their popularity with young listeners on Instagram and Tik Tok. Liam’s curiosity led him to Cooking and other like-sounding Philadelphia bands. 

“When I started releasing music, I put it out under the name Moon Water, and I had a whole plan: this year, I’ll put out the EP, then I’ll put out some singles next year, and finally the album so I’ll get traction,” Liam explains. “Then, maybe about six months in, I was going through a rough patch while recording new songs. So, I diverted and made a new project that reflected how I was feeling under the name hold. That was my first ‘side project.’” He made it’ll pass hastily in 2021, just looking to nurture an impulse. To his surprise, a track ended up on a popular playlist, collecting thousands of listens. He realized that his strict plan wasn’t necessary to gather an audience. He kept making new albums under different names, blurring the line between main project and side projects entirely. As of 2023, Liam has 10 projects. His releases under sign crushes motorist, Take Care, and Birth Day remain his most popular, collecting millions of streams each. While many of their releases center on similar themes like growing up, deep doldrums, and incandescent love, their approaches vary subtly. Birth Day is more squarely an indie rock project, Roaming leans more into dream pop, and sign crushes motorist is the ideal midpoint between Dusterian slowcore and Teen Suicide’s depression rock. 

That hold EP turned out to be pivotal for Liam’s creative energy: “When I first got a few hundred listeners on the hold project, it really kept me going. If a few hundred people like what I’m doing, maybe a few thousand more will, too.” His unconventional approach and nakedly emotion has helped him identify and grow an audience. “I do have a little bit of impostor syndrome over it,” Liam admits. “It just doesn’t feel real.” And, to an extent, it’s hard to believe: the music is good, undoubtedly, but it’s hard to predict what’s going to get listeners’ attention. But, it’s also true that slowcore’s been having a moment lately: Tik Tok’s twin fascination with Duster and Alex G, someone who doesn’t play in the slowcore sandbox but exists somewhere adjacent, has helped musicians like Liam get attention. The users who love Duster and Alex G seem more likely to go on deep dives to find something else that’s special. In the age of the algorithm, repeated plays reinforce the idea that you’re promotable. Every play on one Liam project has the potential to uplift all Liam projects. It all makes sense.

For Liam, the impetus to write Hurting and release it under the sign crushes motorist name is organic: he’s had an emotionally taxing several months. He didn’t decide he was going to write another album, but based on his mood and the genres he felt like exploring, he realized he was, effectively, making another sign crushes motorist album. There are strong parallels: on i’ll be okay, “loser monologue” functions as a spoken-word break, and hurting has one, too, entitled “Manifesto.” It’s a terrifying bummer: “It’s kind of rough, it was from a really dark place,” Liam explains. If there’s anything Liam isn’t afraid to do, it’s externalize the depth of his emotions.

Over ten tracks, Hurting brings the warm guitar tones from i’ll be okay back. “Start” begins with the slow, fuzzy guitar loops that made i’ll be okay so memorable, before Liam’s gentle vocals and minimalist percussion help guide the song along. “Gentle” is a one-minute meditation between the guitar and a gorgeous field recording, complete with bird calls and water sounds that give the album room to breathe. To me, the biggest standouts are the album’s two longest tracks, “Wedding Night” and “Death Of A Heart,” spaces where Liam has more room to let his sound sprawl. The vocal layering on “Wedding Night” immediately reminds me of melanchole. “Death Of A Heart” is bolder, with Liam in a higher register supported by a distinct suite of percussion and ominous stirrings, way more reminiscent of Teen Suicide or even Jordaan Mason than Duster.

I ask Liam what he wants his fan to know and he offers a few things: one, it’s going to be okay. Two, he quietly loves when people don’t know that all the projects are his and when they find out on their own. He never intended to create intrigue, but he thanks everyone for giving him a chance. The DIY labels (Gizzmoix, Dying Dutchman, and Hunkofplastic, to name a few) that have come to specialize in lo-fi indie rock, Liam’s preferred medium, as well as emo, hardcore, and other youth-heavy genres have given Liam the chance to press his music to tape and vinyl without signing his masters away. This ecosystem of independent musicians and labels is remarkable, making manifest the passion projects of primarily young artists on physical media. 

I hope to return to this “scene” of sorts on a regular basis. The music and the ethos are admirable, and the way that “sad” music thrives on Spotify both piques my interest as someone who grew up on it, too, and raises my eyebrow as someone wary of how streaming platforms harness moods to keep listeners listening. I also find myself fascinated with the world of young music fans who’ve grown attached to bands like Duster, Panchiko, and homespun lo-fi music. It’s clear that young people are looking for something different than what the Top 40 radio and Big Indie is serving. What does that mean for the artists, new and young, caught up in this ecosystem? How does social media reinforce it all?

I strongly encourage you to listen to Hurting as well as Liam’s other projects, all of which can be found on streaming. I’ll link you to Liam’s playlist of his personal favorite works. That’s how I pieced together that the force behind all these despondent projects was one intrepid soul.