8/10

There’s something instantly magnetic about 'I love you, trackstar', the new full-length from Los Angeles producer-turned-solo-eccentric Stinkus (the alter-ego of Tyler Thompson), who’s spent years shaping other people’s records and finally decided to vanish into the woods to make one entirely his own. What emerges is an album that feels unfiltered in the best way, stitched together with a kind of chaotic tenderness that can’t be manufactured in a city studio.

Recorded over two feverish weeks in a remote Michigan cabin, the project carries the electricity of someone finally letting themselves be weird without a referee. You can hear the isolation as a form of liberation. Songs lurch between cracked-open confessionals and scrappy indie-rock jolts, the kind where you can practically hear the floorboards vibrating under mismatched amps. There are fingerprints of artists like Alex G and MJ Lenderman in the homespun grit, as Stinkus spirals in his own directions, fuelled by a brain that never stands still.

That unpredictability becomes the album’s pulse. Thompson’s OCD and bipolarity inform the shape of the music itself, giving each track a temperature shift, a new shade of mood, and a sudden left turn. One moment, he’s muttering through a hushed, intimate line that feels like he recorded it at 3am in the dark. The next, they detonate into something shambling and loud and cathartic.

What makes 'I love you, trackstar' so compelling is how alive it feels. These songs breathe, stumble, and grin through tears. You get the sense that Stinkus didn’t tidy up the emotional mess before hitting record; he invited the mess in and let it speak for itself.

For an artist who’s spent years shaping other people’s visions, this album sounds like a chance to be impulsive, imperfect, and completely honest. 'I love you, trackstar' is scrappy, heartfelt, wonderfully crooked indie-rock from a mind that refuses to sit in solitude. And in that refusal, Stinkus finds something close to magic.