Gavin James - “Afterlife”

SXSW 2024 - OEB Score: 7; Popularity Index: 9

Pairs Well With…Hozier, John Mayer, Snow Patrol

A folk troubadour with a penchant for big, pop hooks, Gavin James lands in an accessible field across his catalog of ballads and mid-tempo tracks. While sweet and accessible, there’s musicality in James’s approach, cleanly produced but performed with raw emotion when it counts. While James smartly mixes in catchy, relatively upbeat tracks, it’s in the sparser moments that the Irish performer sounds best, nicely representing in his most recent single “Afterlife”. There’s a less-is-more embrace of the raw power in James’s performance that can hit harder than the accessible, easy melodies that feature across his more cinematic material. (Kevin McStravick)