Danish singer Romyo channels guitarist John Mayer to bring the solo back to pop on ‘Velvet’

The guitar solo has had a rough streaming era. In a market that rewards getting to the hook fast, the instrumental break is often the first thing to go when a pop single is shaped for playlists. Romyo, the new project of Copenhagen musician Emil Wiendel, is betting the other way. His new single, ‘Velvet’, is a lush, dreamlike pop song about a love that was never good for him, and in its middle eight he simply hands the song over to the guitar.

The song starts from a familiar, uncomfortable scenario: running into an ex and finding the old pull intact. “’Velvet’ is about meeting an old flame – about a great and powerful love that was also toxic and marked by suffering,” Romyo says in the announcement. Even when you are close to healing, he explains, you still find yourself surrendering to it, “reborn in the chaos and a symbiosis of sex, sweat and tears. But only in a dream, where what once hurt can be allowed to live on without causing any harm.”

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That dream is the key to the sound. The single explores sleep paralysis, the uneasy state between waking and sleeping, and the release describes an arrangement built to match: simple, transcendent chords and a dreamy soundscape that is both grand and intimate. It is a love song that knows it is trapped, and sounds beautiful anyway.

Then comes the break. In the middle eight, Romyo lets the guitar run free, and he is open about where that impulse comes from: the American guitarist and singer-songwriter John Mayer. “My all-time teen hero is John Mayer. He opened my world to the infinite possibilities contained within the six strings. To the beauty of sound and to letting go. This is where I feel at home. And I think it’s time we bring the guitar back into pop music,” he says.

It is a deliberate statement from an artist who is not starting from zero. Before Romyo, Wiendel released music as Wili Solo, a run that, according to his team, drew attention from Soundvenue in Denmark, the Berlin-based COLORS platform, Ones To Watch in the US and the UK’s CRACK Magazine. Under the new name, the guitar is no longer an accent in the mix. It is the argument.

The team behind the track is small. Wiendel wrote ‘Velvet’ and composed it with producers Jens Rønne and Mikkel Kjær Hanius Hansen, who also mixed it, while Jacob Günther Andersen handled the mastering. The song runs just over four minutes, long enough to give the solo room to breathe instead of squeezing it out.

‘Velvet’ is out now on streaming platforms, released on Friday, October 23, as an independent release by Romyo with distribution through Universal Music in Denmark.

Whether pop is ready to make room for the six strings again is an open question. Romyo has at least made sure his answer lasts the full middle eight.

Tags: Danish singers, Emil Wiendel, guitar solos, John Mayer, Romyo, Universal Music

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