“I think it’s important that I don’t restrict myself”: Flawed Mangoes is defying genre expectations and moving beyond ‘hopecore’
‘Hopecore’ was never meant to be the point. But Evan Lo, the artist known across the digital world as Flawed Mangoes, will forever be associated with that neologism. The American musician’s early releases under the moniker – short, emotive tracks that layer swelling ambience underneath delicately-tapped, looping melodies – were swept into the burgeoning online trend for positive posting in 2023, and he found his audience snowballing as his music became a pillar of the movement.
It was clearly something that happened to Lo’s releases, rather than something he set out to do with them. Lo laughs as he tells Guitar.com that he used to find it “cringe” that people were using the term hopecore to describe his music.
Flawed Mangoes is on the Guitar.com Cover. Image: Sam Keeler for Guitar.com
“Now, I don’t know if I could say I’m at peace with it,” he admits, “but, I don’t care as much these days. How people want to interpret my music is up to them. I’m grateful, at least, that it was a really positive thing that got attached to it, and that was what reached so many people”.
But the word hopecore – which GQ described as “the last gasp of a less-toxic Internet” – is more applicable to content than it is music alone. Hopecore memes and edits are steeped in sentimentality and positive affirmations, with a specific trend for mixing Lo’s music underneath motivational speeches. The combination of Dramamine and Everything Everywhere All At Once star Ke Huy Quan’s joyful Oscar acceptance speech, for instance, has been viewed millions and millions of times, and there’s a related segment on Kai Cenat’s livestream that uses Lo’s track Swimming to soundtrack guests giving their own best motivational speech. Lo even got to take part in that one himself.
Image: Sam Keeler for Guitar.com
As a movement rooted in the deeper recesses of TikTok, fully grasping what the #hopecore tag actually means requires being ‘terminally online’. But it’s also a pushback against the bleak, inhuman feeling that pervades our post-ironic, post-pandemic, post-AI slop internet.
Regardless, Lo’s standing in hopecore does make sense when you dive into his extensive back catalogue. His earliest ‘pre-hopecore’ viral successes showcase his ability to evoke melancholic nostalgia and peaceful reminiscence with only a few layered tracks of reverb-drenched, killswitch-fitted guitar. His musical vignettes have a warmth to them that immediately takes you out of your doomscroll into at least the memory of warm summer evenings and quiet, still mornings.
“How people want to interpret my music is up to them. I’m grateful that it was a really positive thing that got attached to it”
Out on the road
When Guitar.com speaks to Lo for his cover story, he’s just home from a refreshingly offline activity: his first ever tour as Flawed Mangoes. “The shows were awesome, so much fun,” Lo says. “It’s been so long since I was in that world of live music – it was very fulfilling to reconnect with that.” His trip across the US saw him play three shows in New York, LA and his hometown of Boston. And the translation of an audience grown through viral success into bodies in a room was clearly successful, too – he had no problem selling out all three shows.
Lo and his band spent eight months of rehearsals tightening the live sound of Flawed Mangoes, as well as translating his more atmospheric material into a punchier, full-band format. “Prior to putting the shows together, I was pretty scared about that transition. I knew it was something I wanted to do, I just needed to figure out the best way to go about it. But I committed to playing with a band – I thought that would have way better energy on stage compared to me just sitting there with a looper pedal.”
The commitment to adding energy meant expanding things beyond the ‘bedroom’ instrumentation, and recontextualising the music to sit within a setlist rather than a playlist. “The songs developed their own live arrangements,” Lo says. “We were playing with the structure a lot, changing it to make it more fun to play in a live setting, and giving it more energy, and adding drums to the ones without drums. It turned out to be a really fun experience, and I think it surprised a lot of people, too.”
Image: Sam Keeler for Guitar.com
The intro’s over
And speaking of surprises – recent Flawed Mangoes releases have featured one in particular, and that’s Lo’s singing. Lo explains that he’s mainly just trying to make music that’s “addictive to listen to”, whatever it sounds like. “I just listen to too much music with vocals not to be inspired by that,” he says. “It’s been a really fun journey, learning how to sing and how to write with vocals.”
But tracks like Surreal don’t just add vocals. They’ve evolved the Flawed Mangoes sound into dense, heavy shoegaze with a mathy edge – too chaotic to gently bubble away in the background of an edit. But while full band stuff may be new territory for Flawed Mangoes, it’s not so much for Lo himself. “In high school I was in a math rock band, and then a jazzy indie band. We didn’t play that many shows, but we rehearsed every week, and wrote songs, and just enjoyed doing that,” he says.
“It was math rock and post rock that were the two colliding worlds for me – bands like Battles and El Ten Eleven were hugely influential. Maybe the biggest influence at the time, though, was Tera Melos. They were doing this crazy tapping along with some really heavy stuff and frantic song structures – all the math rock shit! I really liked that. That’s where I really learned to tap, and write riffs around tapping.”
“I committed to playing with a band – I thought that would have way better energy compared to me just sitting there with a looper pedal”
Producer’s mindset
After spending his high school years playing in bands, Lo put the guitar down when he was at college, finding himself drawn into electronic, producer-focused scenes. “I was more active on SoundCloud, in all these niche internet genres – I got into vaporwave at one point, and lofi – these internet producer scenes where people could release music and find an audience through the community, which was really great.”
Online music discovery, however, has changed a lot since the mid-2010s. In the heyday of vaporwave and lofi beats, microlabels were the place to go to find either an audience or new artists. “Now, it feels like people are realising it can be easier to bypass that label platform when you’re making music – it’s this even playing field. You can build your own brand, and put your own music out there.”
Of course, it’s nice cyclical synchronicity that Lo was active in these scenes – in some ways they were the precursors to a lot of today’s internet-rooted music. “Aesthetically and musically, they still have some influence on what’s popular,” Lo says. “But everything changes very fast.”
The 80s and 90s nostalgia of vaporwave has moved on into reminisces about the jungle and breakbeat soundtracks of PS1 and PS2 video games, the electronic flipside to a revival of Deftones-esque, Y2K-inspired nu-gaze. But regardless of what specific ‘era’ Lo’s music might evoke, though, he states that a “key part” of his sound is “going for that nostalgic sort of feeling – for instance, I really like what Boards Of Canada do, they’re one of my favourite artists.”
Image: Sam Keeler for Guitar.com
Cycling back
After graduating Lo returned to the guitar, because, in his words, “everything’s cyclical”. “The guitar was what ended up breaking through on social media. So then I was thinking, ‘I guess I’m back all in on guitar now’ – but having the producer’s experience and skillset was vital. Being able to mix and master all of my own music then get it out as quickly as possible has been really important for my process.”
It’s also helped him develop his sonic signatures. “On the plugin side, I use a tape emulator called Sketch Cassette all the time for the lo-fi vibe. But maybe more important than that are digital artefacts. They may sound shitty to some people, but they can be tastefully dialled in. I get a lot of them by time-stretching with non-optimal algorithms, or just by using digital pitch-shifters – they really take things to a level that the analogue artefacts just can’t!”
That’s not to say Lo doesn’t appreciate real effects pedals – quite the opposite. His most valued, he tells Guitar.com, is his MXR Dyna Comp, set to give him maximum sustain. And on the guitar side, he got pretty hands-on with his own made-in-Mexico Telecaster to install that DIY killswitch. “For whatever reason a friend of mine was stripping a J Mascis Jazzmaster for parts. We ended up taking the rhythm circuit switch from it and I thought, oh, I can make a killswitch with this!”
“I had heard Jonny Greenwood, Tom Morello and Buckethead use one and thought it was cool. So we soldered it together in their basement and cut a little hole in the pickguard with an Exacto knife, which is why it’s kinda fucked-up looking. The Tele was one I got for $350 second-hand, and it was my backup. So I didn’t care about it as much – there wasn’t much thought into it, other than ‘this would be cool’.”
“People are realising it can be easier to bypass that label platform when you’re making music – it’s this even playing field”
Hopecore and beyond
Obviously the installation of that killswitch turned out to be more than just some cool addition to a backup guitar – Killswitch Lullaby now has well over 100 million Spotify streams, and its viral success was the first step in launching Flawed Mangoes’ career into what it is now.
But it’s arguable that Killswitch Lullaby and other tracks like it, with their melancholic haziness and tightly-curated palette of layered, ambient melodies, were primed to be folded into other content – especially on TikTok, a platform that makes it easy to mash one thing into another. And so came an inevitable drive to build on those shorter pieces.
“I definitely did find it a little limiting,” Lo says. “There was this expectation to create this really specific genre. I think it’s important that I don’t restrict myself, and this is something that I still feel like I have a lot of space to grow in. I was in this one lane of instrumental, drumless guitar music – so making different stuff really helps me get out of my head, and be like, ‘I can do whatever I want, and it’ll be okay’”.
Flawed Mangoes’ new single Anthem is out now.
Words: Cillian Breathnach
Photography: Sam Keeler
The post “I think it’s important that I don’t restrict myself”: Flawed Mangoes is defying genre expectations and moving beyond ‘hopecore’ appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
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