By Paul Patras, Newswire Intern
It’s calm, it’s powerful and it’s on a soft guitar melody: it’s Flawed Mangoes, an artist that creates music that makes you feel a whimsical, joyous and ponderous mood in the first few tabs. Flawed Mangoes’ music is like the sound track of a coming-of-age story playing over and over again. And to think it’s only one person creating the niche sounds, using a “kill switch” and overlapping melodies.
With the drop of his new album The Unwavering Hand, Evan Lo, or better known as Flawed Mangoes, shows yet again the power of raw creativity, passion and a simple guitar. New songs like “Mind Game” as well as single such as “Signals Lost” and “Cold” are melodies that will make you reflect on your life. What is even more impactful is that most of these songs don’t have a single lyric.
Lo began his musical career in May 2020, right at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic with the release of his first single, “I Am No Fun,” which includes lyrics from artist Handsome and melodies created by Lo. Lo’s first few songs created in 2020 all followed a similar structure of soft melodies being overlaid with other artists’ vocals. He released his first album, Nothing Good Will Come of This in 2020, which includes five songs, three of which are singles. The singles are all melodic beats, and the other songs have vocal tracks.
It wasn’t until the release of his single “Kill Switch Lullaby” that Lo’s music career took off in 2023. This song is purely Flawed Mangoes not just in the sense that it was solely produced by him, but also in that the tone and vibe that this song relates is reflected in much of his later music. Calm and deep guitar riffs he played in and out with the utilization of a kill switch that he installed into his guitar. This song is currently sitting at over 37 million streams on Spotify.
Flawed Mangoes is the stage name for Evan Lo. He has not stated the reason for his fruity stage name.
What helped Flawed Mangoes garner this success was the trend of “hope core” on social media that spreads messages of encouragement and positivity, urging listeners to never give up. In many videos, it’s common for Flawed Mangoes’ melodies to be played in the background because of his calm, powerful but almost simplistic nature.
Months later, Flawed Mangoes dropped two singles that were again uniquely called “The Beginning” and “Birdsong.” Both songs are peaceful, yet he utilizes powerful tones and riffs to elicit a feeling of wonder. The fact that these songs don’t have lyrics allows for them to be entirely subjective in nature, people can relate to these songs more because they aren’t about particular stories. These songs were all put into a single album, Kill Switch Melodies, which has garnered millions of streams. These songs lack vocals and follow the trend of overlaying melodies over one another with the use of a modified guitar.
A few months later in 2024, Flawed Mangoes went on to release various singles all following this format. This also included various acoustic versions of his popular songs and even two songs that combine this formula with vocals from other artists, returning to the original Flawed Mangoes formula from 2020. These two songs, “Take Your Aim” and “Leave a Message,” are both powerful on their own, and even though they go against the grain of the typical instrumental songs, they can hold their own in the industry.This brings us back to the most recent release of The Unwavering Hand, an album that, according to Flawed Mangoes, describes the “emotional highs and lows that come with this lifelong journey.” Flawed Mangoes makes music that makes you think, reflect and, most importantly makes you feel. This music is all about what it feels like to be human: to strive, to fail and to never give up.