In Yun

1-800 MIKEY — 2026

“In Yun turns bedroom fuzz, lovesick hooks, and twenty-something restlessness into one of the year’s most immediately likable power pop records.”

Michael Barker is in his early 20s, and 1-800 MIKEY is the kind of project that makes you a little jealous of how easy he makes all of this look. In Yun is his third album and his first for Goner Records, and it comes at you with a perfect collision of scrappy energy and real songwriting. Barker records himself in Parramatta, and you can hear the bedroom in it. The guitars are fuzzed out and slightly overdriven, the melodic bass lines do a lot of the song structure work, and everything moves quickly. When “Me and My Only” comes tearing in with its great repeated riff, Barker is already deep in the kind of real lyrics that run through the whole record, admitting his heart “kicks into overdrive” the second somebody looks at him. Nothing here sounds fussed over. That is the entire appeal and the reason anyone that enjoys a good lo-fi outing should be checking in with 1-800 MIKEY.

What will keep you coming back is how much feeling Barker packs into songs this loose. His vocals sit buried in the mix, which I think could bug some people if you were expecting to hear everything crystal clear. I never minded listening a little closer to catch them, and half the time the lines reward the effort. The title track is a great example of the emotion poured into this album, a quiet ache about a love that got away as he wonders “what we could have been” if she had not left, sung like a kid staring at the ceiling at 3am. Then, a couple songs later, “K Style” pulls out a shotgun and a sword and turns into a total cartoon, and somehow both work. He writes an ode to a cat named Ragnar, another to a bong he calls Subaru, and on “Self-Love” he is just trying to find “peace and love inside my mind.” The whole thing feels like a guy emptying his notebook without second-guessing a single page. In Yun swings for a great hook on nearly every song, and it connects far more often than it misses. For a record that feels this off the cuff, that is a hell of a hit rate.