Thursday, May 5th saw a sold-out Sinclair, and Holly Lapsley Fletcher, better known to downtempo electro-pop fans as Lapsley, is to blame. She’s been compared to Adele and James Blake for her broken-hearted ballads and experimental synth soundscapes. Comparisons to seasoned pop artists in their late twenties aren’t fitting, but the 19 year-old Liverpool native is making music with a uniquely millennial mindset. Her glossy, dreamy, raw tracks are a certain kind of accessible only deliverable by someone born in the mid ‘90’s. Her sound plays with nostalgia, gender, and tradition. It’s retrofuturism fueled, computer-powered, vast and vulnerable; and it exudes the energy of someone in their late teens in the year 2016.

Lapsley’s live performance only further displayed her confidence in this exploration of sound. Her opening track, “Burn” seemed subdued for an opener, but that didn’t stop the odd (yet endearing) mixture of young queers and frat boys in the audience from moving to the music. “Painter” and “Dancing” followed up her opening sequence with icy, airy, delicate vocals, as the artist traded her computer for a keyboard.

But what really won over the audience seemed to be Lapsley’s velvety smooth, booming vocal stylings, especially on dancier hits like “Tell Me the Truth” and gospel/disco/electronica fusion “Operator (He Doesn’t Call Me),” both from her recent debut LP Long Way Home, out on XL records. Just from seeing the crowd interact during and between these songs, as well as her two-toned finale, “Station,” in which she layered and altered her voice to create a high-and-low set of vocals, it was clear that Lapsley is an artist that represents a new way of thinking about making music with computers. She’s using them as instruments, and that voice-changing mic seamlessly fills the need for an additional vocalist. She’s mixing generation Y’s weird sense of nostalgia for every decade in the past 50 years (she uses a dial-tone effect in “Operator”, was wearing a late 80’s grungy denim trench coat on stage, and covered a Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” during her encore), with our simultaneous sense of self-deprecation and apathy (i.e. lyrics like “If you’re gonna hurt me, why don’t you hurt me a little bit more?” and “Tell me the truth, it’ll hurt less, I guess”). 

The result is obviously a 19 year-old exploring different moody atmospheres, and she’s definitely succeeding. Her only big downfall is that she doesn’t have a bigger repertoire. But she’s got time for that.