Starchild & The New Romantic

Bryndon Cook describes his recording project Starchild & The Romantic as Champion Music for the Heartbroken. In 2016, at the moment of Crucial, his first EP with Ghostly International, which landed the New York City-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist in Rolling Stones 25 under 25 list, that sentiment felt entirely on-point. In 2018, Cook’s full-length debut, Language a refinement of his phonics for funk, electro, and R&B, and a vibrant, mercurial statement record reveals the artists intention to stretch the expression beyond love. Lifting off from the monochrome world of Crucial, up towards a dazzling blood-rush of sky-high defiance, Cook presents Champion Music not just for heartbreak, but for intersectionality. This is music engineered to confront binaries like old and new, black and white, religiosity and sexuality, and to do so triumphantly. Not bad for a “romantic boy from Maryland,” a dreamer who grew into a student of Black musics rich lineage, keenly interested in its convergences with pop.