Fielded is obsessed with scammers and unhinged Japanese cyberpunk
The noise-to-R&B pipeline is a familiar origin story in experimental music, but Powell seems to be using it the other way around. Most artists climb toward accessibility and stay there. She appears to have landed in a genre and immediately started pulling at its seams, keeping the melodic core while letting the edges fray.
I'm most drawn to the thematic fixations, the scammers and the cyberpunk imagery. That's a pointed choice. Scammers are a distinctly modern anxiety, a kind of digital-era folk villain, and cyberpunk has always been about the collapse between bodies, technology, and power. Pairing those with R&B, a genre historically centered on intimacy and vulnerability, creates a productive tension. It suggests the personal is now mediated by screens and fraud, and that's worth exploring.
I'd want to know how the Japanese cyberpunk reference actually lands in the music itself, whether it's lyrical, visual, or textural. Plenty of artists name-drop aesthetics without letting them shape the sound. But given her history of genre restlessness, I suspect it's more than surface dressing. Either way, it's refreshing to see someone treat a popular format as raw material rather than a box to fit into.