TOD – BUS RIDE @TODthegiant

TOD’s “BUS RIDE” is a love song that mixes pop and hip hop to describe what it feels to want someone or something that you can’t have. It talks about spending your lonely nights thinking about this on the bus ride home.

Mixing a little bit of pop, hip-hop, alternative R’n’B and rap, recording artist, Tola Oluwole, professionally known as TOD is “creating his own wave of sound in the UK”. TOD was born in the year 2000 in Illinois, Chicago in the United States of America.

TOD started his music career in 2018 and has gone on to work with other upcoming artist and producers in the UK like DLK, Scorpio_1990, The wizard and Naveo. Though he was born in America, in his early life he moved between the UK and Nigeria for school and later on came down to London where he now lives and creates music from. His debut single “Bus ride” which was produced by Scorpio_1990 is to be released on the 22nd of May, 2020 independently. The visuals were shot by production company, Future16 and edited by director/editor Raza Tariq and will also be premiering on the same date.

TOD is an artist who works in a variety of the arts having dabbled in acting, modelling and photography and now feels the world is ready for his music. With a subtle minimalistic approach, TOD creates work in which a fascination with the clarity of content and an uncompromising attitude towards conceptual and minimal art can be found. The work is aloof and systematic and a cool and neutral imagery is used. His practice provides a useful set of allegorical tools for manoeuvring with a pseudo-minimalist approach in the world of art: these meticulously planned works resound and resonate with sounds culled from the fantastical realm of imagination. By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of middle class values, he often creates work using creative game tactics, but these are never permissive. Play is a serious matter: during the game, different rules apply than in everyday life and even everyday objects undergo transubstantiation.

His works feature coincidental, accidental and unexpected connections which make it possible to revise music history and, even better, to complement it. Combining unrelated aspects lead to surprising analogies. By experimenting with aleatoric processes, he creates work through labour-intensive processes which can be seen explicitly as a personal exorcism ritual. Though he has drawn inspiration from a lot of current mainstream and underground artist, this idea was inspired by a nineteenth-century tradition of works, in which an ideal of ‘Fulfilled was inspired by a nineteenth-century tradition of works, in which an ideal of ‘Fulfilled Absence’ was seen as the pinnacle.

His works are characterised by the use of everyday objects in an atmosphere of middleclass mentality in which recognition plays an important role. By referencing romanticism, grand-guignolesque black humour and symbolism, he formalizes the coincidental and emphasizes the conscious process of composition that is behind the seemingly random works. The thought processes, which are supposedly private, highly subjective and unfiltered in their references to dream worlds, are frequently revealed as assemblages.

Furthermore, his works are often classified as part of the new romantic movement because of the desire for the local in the unfolding globalised world. However, this reference is not intentional, as this kind of art is part of the collective memory.

TOD is now working on a couple of singles and his debut Ep “Love Lost” which emphasises the themes of loneliness, violence and heartache in London streets. He says as the new generation of young talent takes the rem, ‘ it is important to remember to ‘love, chase your dreams and abandon bad habits and bad people’ and TOD* has stated that the songs on his EP will reflect this.