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Jan 31, 2023 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Lauren Desberg

Producer and multi-instrumentalist brad allen williams has made his career with the guitar, having previously played with Brittany Howard, Nate Smith, and Kinfolk over his long career. In that time, he has gained a reputation as a virtuosic and experimental player, but he has also grown acutely aware of how the instrument has been “overleveraged in the last 100 years of popular music.” As he explains, “There’s very little you can do on an electric guitar in 2023 that doesn’t–whether intentionally or unintentionally–evoke some past cultural moment.”

It is precisely that overexposure that Williams is fighting on his forthcoming debut solo record, œconomy, out February 10th via Colorfield Records. The album finds Williams attempting to chart the unexplored corners of the guitar’s sound, crafting a record that plays within the margins of jazz, experimental, and neo-classical music. He has already shared the album’s lead single, “tecnologia” ft. Mark Giuliana, and today he’s back with another new track, “boomer,” premiering with Under the Radar.

Williams’ latest track is an expansive guitar odyssey, one where he plays both celestial psychedelic savant and gritty rock guitar hero. The track opens on watery synth starbursts and a rumbling guitar riff, steadily ratcheting up the tension until Williams takes the song into the stratosphere with a soaring guitar solo. In the latter half, the track gently floats back down to earth, backed by thrums of acoustic guitar and vintage analog synths. The resulting track playfully references Williams’ rock guitar forebears while lovingly reframing them into his spacey psychedelic expanse.

Williams says of the track, “Self-conscious avoidance of all the electric guitar’s accumulated cultural baggage sometimes feels reflexive, and I found myself doing a lot of it during the making of this album. But sometimes the best way out is through.

Co-producer Pete Min suggested we plunge headlong into the abyss: to make a distorted-guitar riff rocker, but find a way to use that cliché’s own powers against it.

We plugged guitars into Moog synthesizers instead of amplifiers, I played some Bonham-inspired drums into a single microphone, and we amused ourselves with an earnest-but-not-entirely-earnest guitar solo and Stylophone coda. The result grew on us quite a bit; I really hope my genuine love of guitar heroism (and the blues in all of its many guises) gets across.”

Check out the song below. Williams’ debut LP, œconomy, is due out February 10th via Colorfield records.