The cultural theorist Joe Kennedy captured this guy perfectly in his 2018 book Authentocrats : the kind of centrist dad who, far from being into Deep Purple and aviator sunglasses as a popular reading of that meme might have it, ostentatiously cultivates his love of Observer -approved good taste – Kraftwerk, the Giro D’Italia, the Liberal Democrats – while confidently dismissing anything that might be a little more antagonistic, awkward or even just flatly mass-cultural ( “don’t encourage them, Jeremy!”).

In this way, it can sometimes feel like the narrative for Yves Tumor has been predetermined, precision-engineered to tick all the right boxes for a certain kind of ‘tasteful’ (to use a loaded word), middle-aged music fan. For better or worse, the story of Yves Tumor can be understood as the classic tale of the creative rebel overcoming the small-minded adversity of their origins: in this reading, a certain radicalism is present, partly due to the sheer imagination of Tumor’s music, but it’s individualised rather than counter-hegemonic, the character arc of an outsider breaking into the art world through a narrow gap rather than threatening its stifling traditional structures, its specifics perfectly compatible with the coffee tables of the streaming age. Yves Tumor has, therefore, been on a real ‘journey’, creatively and geographically they embody the ‘chameleonic’ qualities of middlebrow icons like David Bowie and Radiohead they are, if not exactly a ‘small-town kid done good’, certainly someone from a relative backwater finding international success via an uncompromising artistic approach. Since then, Sean Bowie has become Yves Tumor, living across the US and Europe before eventually settling in Turin, all the while releasing explorative, multivalent music and operating at the glamorous intersection of haute couture, fine art and experimental sound. There, they met fellow genre-splicer Mykki Blanco and eventually the kinds of people who’d guide them through the maze of the music industry over the subsequent decade. Their backstory spools out as a very particular, rarefied version of the classic rock’n’roll dream: the artist also known as Sean Bowie grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, a place they’ve since described as a “very conservative, racist, homophobic, sexist environment”, before escaping to California aged 20. It’s easy to indulge in cliché when writing about Yves Tumor.

Something's Not Right by yves.