Credit: Dangerous Minds / Leggomygreggo8

Can you believe that some people feel like you can predict what happens in the music industry?

I know, mental isn’t it? Pop music as an industry is ever-changing. One that’s as predictable as a storm and twice as difficult to navigate. Imagine going back to the end of the Covid lockdowns and telling people that within three years the three most exciting pop acts in the world would be a queer singer-songwriter recently dropped from her label, a Disney starlet who’d only just turned to Broadway and Charli XCX, whose messy, love/hate relationship with mainstream acceptance had seemingly made a lifelong cult act out of her.

Yet, people still think that pop music is all a bit of a doss. That people’s tastes are as easy to read as the path of the moon, and that a musician’s path to stardom can be planned out like a decent fry-up. Bit of social media presence, a few over-subscribed early gigs, a maximum of two songs available on streaming sites to make them as easy to digest as possible, then away you go. Make those songs as hooky and digestible as possible, then sit back and watch the money roll in.

Jaded music industry types will tell you this is the path to stardom, and anyone who strays from it is an idiot who doesn’t want to be famous. This is despite the fact that they, of all people, know just how often his attitude blows up in their face. That just because a song gets playlisted by Radio 1 doesn’t mean that they’re going to be a megastar, and that a solid social media following is almost always bots. What they’re just as, if not even more scared of, is the fact that the opposite is also true.

There are always people who achieve numbers that any corporate A&R stooge would stab their dog for while proudly going their own way. Arguably, the best example of this comes from the 19-year-old Irish singer-songwriter Liam McCay. This is a guy who makes achingly personal, stark, slowcore that’s rarely more than just his guitar and his mumbling voice. What’s more, this is a guy who rarely releases music under the same name twice. Yet his success is already staggering, yet only just beginning.

How has Sign Crushes Motorist gotten so successful?

Liam McCay more often than not records under the name Sign Crushes Motorist. A pretty grisly moniker that flies in the face of what a mainstream audience wants to listen to in the first place. Before you say anything about what constitutes a “mainstream audience”, just take a look at his biggest single to date ‘Loser Monologue’, which has hit 57 million plays on Spotify alone. If those aren’t mainstream numbers, I don’t know what is. Then you get the fact that McCay doesn’t always release music under that name.

The list of monikers that McCay has released music under reads like a Heavenly Records roster from the early 1990s. Some of these could be acts making up the recent Shoegaze revival, like Take Care, Birth Day, Manta and Roaming. Some of them are a little more out there, like Make His Ribs Show, Moon Water and busty latinas (seriously?). McCay himself has said that he gives different projects different names based on the their individual vibes. Of all of them, however, perhaps the most fitting moniker is Miserable Teens Club, as that really could sum up what McCay is going for with his music.

Just look at the aforementioned ‘Loser Monologue’, lines like “If you knew how I felt, I wouldn’t even be writing this shit / I wouldn’t be so lonely.” Of an early album, Hurting, McCay said it was inspired by “possibly the worst time of my life mentally, and it took a lot of self motivation to even get out of bed, let alone write and record stuff.” A

s sad as it sounds, that’s a feeling that millions of people McCay’s age can relate to, and the real reason his music is resonating today as much as it is.

Because that’s the real reason artists make a name for themselves, isn’t it? No matter what algorithms or data analysis tell you about what the youth of today is, you’ll never truly be able to predict what artists make an impact without also understanding how people are feeling. Whatever else is involved with the music business, the emotions come first, and lead to genuinely exciting names like Liam McCay becoming as big a deal as they deserve.