Alex Lloyd

Alex Lloyd is one of Australia’s most compelling songwriters, an artist with a reverence for classic pop songwriting who’s nonetheless willing to completely dismantle it in order to arrive at something new and strange. Born Alex Wasiliev in 1975 in Sydney, Lloyd learned to play on his dad’s old guitar with the aid of one lasting influence: a Beatles songbook. Black the Sun, his 1999 debut, is a highly experimental triumph that embraces the Fab Four’s melody-making, along with touchstone sounds of the era like grunge and Britpop—but has one foot in the future as well, anticipating pop-leaning indie rock on songs like the spacey “Lucky Star.” His subsequent three albums—2001’s Watching Angels Mend, 2003’s Distant Light, and 2005’s self-titled LP—moved toward a more straight-ahead rock sound, but Lloyd’s preference for lushness has never waned, as heard on the multi-layered “Never Meant to Fail” and pseudo-psychedelic “Beautiful.”