Music

A 5-Year-Old TikTok Star Made A COVID-19 Themed Experimental Pop Album, And Music Nerds Love It

"There's something so ethereal and mystical about this album. Why is it here, who made it, why does it have so many bangers? Questions we will never know the answer to."

by Jared Richards  22 July 2020
Who is Emily Montes?

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Charli XCX may have released a whole album about life under COVID-19 lockdown, but so has five-year-old TikTokker Emily Montes. Her self-titled debut touches upon the same themes of isolation, loneliness and existential dread — and pop-heads are obsessed.

But who is Emily Montes? That’s not exactly clear: her TikTok has 29,000+ followers, and is mostly incomprehensible stuff a five-year-old might upload to the internet, though the account says it’s managed by her mother. It feels a bit …odd that she has so many followers, but the music’s appeal as a pop-oddity makes a tiny bit more sense, though it’s not exactly clear how pop music nerds found Emily Rose.

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Her music appeared on a few music sub-Reddits (PC Music, Popheadscirclejerk, Popheads) shortly after the album was uploaded to streaming services a month ago, and circulated on Twitter and across Facebook groups from there.

Over on review site Album Of The Year, users are seriously dissecting Emily Montes’ merits, with comparisons aplenty to Teen Mom star Farrah Abraham’s 2012 mess of an album, which has since been reconsidered “avant-garde pop”. Meanwhile, The Needle Drop has responded to calls to review it with a short tweet: “There are adults making worse music, tbh”.

Emily Montes has 14 tracks, and runs for four minutes and 45 seconds. The longest track is the arguable emotional crux, ‘Take Me Away’, while the shortest clocks in at seven seconds, a short ode to online game creator Roblox, suitably titled ‘Roblox is my life’.

Heavily auto-tuned and existing at the intersection of trap and hyperpop (think Charli XCX or 100 Gecs with a touch of Lil Uzi Vert), Emily Montes sees the TikTok star detail her everyday life under quarantine. It’s oddly addictive, if not for how purely strange it is.

You could either read it as an unfiltered insight into how a child feels about living under lockdown, or some weird art experiment that exudes a slightly dark energy. It’s probably both.

Opening track ‘EmiLy’ spells it all out: “My name is Emily and I am five/I love Roblox and playing outside/I miss school but I’m stuck inside/This virus has me losing my mind”. Later track ‘Emily Montes (Corona Is Crazy)” sees the five-year-old deal with what she sees as the “end of the world” while declaring she is the “best rapper alive” — a 29-second track which oscillates wildly between the manic emotions we all feel within a day.

Elsewhere, the five-year-old explores the false fulfilment of finding new hobbies under lockdown conditions to pass the time. On ‘Untitled’, she boasts about being “the best rapper alive” while admitting she is “five, just trying to survive”, her confidence immediately being revealed as a facade.

But on ‘Emily Rose’, Emily appears to believe her own lines, projecting praise onto an imaginary audience: “Only been rapping an hour/Some say I’m better than Nicki/And Chance The Rapper/My rapping is so cool/Don’t need to go to school”.

Analysing the lyrics is fun, but music fans are a bit more interested in how odd the production is. It feels very unfinished, between the way samples jutter in and out or songs cut out mid-beat and all the awkward silences. You could imagine that a five-year-old is behind this, or it’s just adults who are doing their best impression, or it’s an experimental producer.

“The double-whammy of ‘if you know you know if you dont you dont’ to ‘take me away’ feels like abstract spoken word over airy and disjointed ambiance until they reach their drops….  [points] genuinely and sincerely feel like they reflect the inconsistent mindset of a five-year-old,” writes Album Of The Year user Nana.

There’s definitely an appeal in the mystery — and also the odd way Emily Montes mirrors the tone and sonic landscape of Charli XCX’s how i’m feeling now, suggesting that whoever made it was incredibly in-tune with pop culture.

“There’s something so ethereal and mystical about this album,” writes ToasterQueen12, in a review which gives Emily Montes a 77/110.  “Why is it here, who made it, why does it have so many bangers? Questions we will never know the answer to.”

But it’s the review by NijaKiller17 that sums up the album inspires equal parts reflection and uneasiness: “I feel like there is something to say about how this album basically encompasses all of internet culture in less than 5 minutes but atm I don’t want to think that hard so maybe later.”

Listen to Emily Montes below, alongside ‘BLM George Floyd’, a tribute track.