"Starting Bell," the focus track from Cash O'Brien's debut EP Starting Bell, comes from Cash O’Brien, a 26-year-old Brooklyn songwriter who took three years to put together this seven-song record in his bedroom and that kind of patience has a way of showing up in the music.
The song's most convincing quality comes from how widely it moves. The vocal passages are clipped and pulse-driven, with a breathy, conversational delivery in a mid-register that sounds lived-in and not put on. What makes it interesting is the contrast of a bright, slightly abrasive melodic hook that arrives with real force, and the shift reads less like a genre exercise and more like a deliberate choice. The vocal that returns later is more sustained, pushed toward something closer to a declaration than a confession. The move from inward to outward suits an artist who talks about channeling personal experience into music in a way that is at once creative and connective.
I consider myself incredibly lucky to be able to channel my own experiences and emotions into music. The act of creating it would be enough, but getting to hear others’ experience with my songs makes it all the more worth it. I’m very proud of my debut, and happy to say that I have much more on the way.
O'Brien's co-writing credit on Frances Forever's "Space Girl" signals a pop instinct that knows how to stay emotionally direct without going soft, and "Starting Bell" lands in that same territory melodically accessible, personally grounded, and more dynamically ambitious than bedroom pop tends to bother with.
For a debut built in a Brooklyn bedroom, O'Brien already knows something that takes most artists years to figure out...intimacy and force aren't opposites, and the best pop songs don't choose between them.
