Emerging artist Presence is preparing to release his debut album Tears in the Moshpit! this fall, and on Friday, he shared his latest single "I Don't Wanna Be Like You!"
It's an admittedly personal song, as he shared about the track: "The person I wrote this song about ghosted me ... worst part about it is, it was my family."
The song arrives ahead of the full record, which is out Oct. 4 via Nettwerk, and it further proves Presence's ability to weave a variety of sounds into his work, floating effortlessly between pop-punk and hip-hop, and everything in between.
Speaking with Variance earlier this year at SXSW in Austin, Presence elaborated on his hopes of not limiting himself and not being pigeonholed as an artist either.
"It is my goal, to some extent, to create different worlds that I feel like can coexist together by me just being me," says Presence. "I pigeonholed myself in a lot of ways in the past, where I was like, 'This is what people expect from me. This is what I need to do.' And it wasn't until I met the producer who's worked on this record with me, Sweaters Beats, and my co-writer Gianni Taylor, that I was really able to realize like, 'Oh, I do have a lot more ideas in my head!' And having these people around me that I'm comfortable with can help pull them out of me."
Presence has also fully embraced the reality of the music industry and the importance of TikTok in the current ecosystem. While many other artists have been hesitant to lean into the app's influence in the industry, Presence says he definitely sees the upside of it.
"They've been particularly nice to me," he explains. "I was just at the TikTok headquarters recently and I was speaking with a few of the developers like from China. They're the nicest people I've ever spoken to. So, obviously, maybe I haven't built a career off TikTok, but it has helped me grow my career. They're the only platform that's ever listened to me directly and reached out to me and were like, 'We want your feedback—come to our headquarters and talk to us.' So I hope that it doesn't get banned."
As for the full album, Tears in the Moshpit!, Presence says: “This album is a culmination of everything I felt in the first 21 years of my life. Making it brought me back to life in a lot of ways. If someone can listen to it, and feel the way I did when we made it, that would be enough for me.”
Check out "I Don't Wanna Be Like You!" below.