Chiiild doesn’t care if you think their music is uncool

The cool kids might be catching on to Chiiild, but Chiiild has never really had much interest in playing it cool to anyone but Chiiild itself.

Indeed, it’s been refreshing to hear Yonatan Ayal — the Montreal-raised, now Los Angeles-based singer, producer and multi-instrumentalist behind the internationally acclaimed electro-soul outfit — venture into musical territory where hipsters fear to tread of late when name-checking some of the textbook “uncool” influences (Linkin Park, Incubus and John Mayer among them) lurking in the heady mix on Chiiild’s woozily wondrous new album, “Better Luck in the Next Life.”

“That’s the kind of s–t I don’t really care about, but let me think of the least cool reference I can think of,” laughed Ayal from a tour stop in Cambridge, Mass., en route to a Wednesday-night hometown gig and “dinner with my family” in Montreal, and a Toronto show at the Axis Club on Thursday.

“The Goo Goo Dolls? I don’t know if that’s considered uncool, but I thought that s–t was tight. I always kind of stray away from what people consider cool because it’s kind of like a ‘groupthink’ kind of thing and, I think, a little bit uncool. When everyone that’s considered cool looks the same, I think that’s really cringe-y. I think cool, in some ways, has become synonymous with ‘cringe.’

“I’ve worked with a lot of different artists and sometimes it’s like they all do the same thing, but they just kind of put green hair or purple hair on or pink hair on. They just put on a different outfit and play the same music and it’s called ‘left.’ So I’ve always rolled my eyes at that concept.”

Although Ayal has worked behind the scenes as a songwriter and producer for such A-list names as Jennifer Lopez and Usher, marching to the (sleepy) beat of his own drum is what has allowed him to ease into the periphery of the mainstream consciousness since quietly issuing Chiiild’s seductive debut EP, “Synthetic Soul,” to much vociferous praise and tens of millions of streams on both sides of the Atlantic in 2020.

Chiiild’s last record, 2021’s guardedly upbeat “Hope for Sale,” was the almost accidental product of Ayal trying to get himself through the darkest days of COVID-19 lockdown paranoia, but “Better Luck in the Next Life” is a thoroughly confident and intentional deep dive into the omnivorous stew of musical inspirations that have given rise to such a singular sound: a kaleidoscopic breed of 21st-century R&B that can evoke, say, Boards of Canada, Pink Floyd, Frank Ocean, and Sly and the Family Stone in a single tune and make it all seem perfectly natural.

Ayal envisioned it as a sort of internal mix tape, a genre-blurring, headphone-ready homage to the myriad sounds he would listen to while walking to and from school or “alone in my thoughts” in Montreal back in the day.

“This was the first time that I actually sat down and said, ‘I’m working on an album,’” he said. “‘Synthetic Soul’ was just, like, exploration. ‘Is this something?’ There was no audience.

“The only reason why you were doing that was you felt like doing something that day, and it was created in such spaced-out events, whereas ‘Hope for Sale’ was created through the pandemic and, as a creator, you’re a product of your environment, so you start pulling from the things that you’re experiencing and you just kind of reflect the times; hence the title, ‘Hope for Sale,’ and that kind of polarity between wanting to be light and also being bummed out about everything, wanting to be hopeful but also kind of talking yourself out of having no hope,” he said.

“But that again was a collection of songs where originally it was like, ‘Let’s just make an EP and see how it feels,’ and then we ended up with a solid amount of music where it was like, ‘All right, this kind of feels like an album. Let’s call this an album.’”

Translating such an in-your-own-head record to the stage would take “another eight people” beyond Chiiild’s current four-piece touring lineup — not to mention carting “Better Luck in the Next Life” guest vocalists Charlotte Cardin and Lucky Daye along for the ride — were it not for Ayal and production partner Pierre-Luc Rioux’s deft hands with their many electronic doodads, but the shows are anything but programmatic. Chiiild does, after all, have an incredibly dense palette of sounds with which to work. And the audiences are all in.

“It’s really quite a musical show. I completely musical-direct the whole show and I make really fresh edits every night,” said Ayal. “So you might hear a sound that plays in the bridge that was kind of buried on the record and that might be the thing that we live on for 16 bars, just rebuilding and reharmonizing on that thing. So it’s a lot more energetic and it’s really musical, and all the things that I think might go over people’s heads I just kind of make them obvious and live in them, you know?

“We’re lucky we don’t really have a particular song that stands out or that’s run away from all the other ones. They all have a similar amount of success, so when you come to a show everyone is just like on ‘12’ for every song.

“It’s not, ‘Hey, we’re all just waiting for that one song that happens to show up at the end.’ Right from the beginning there’s memories and nostalgia associated with all of them, and people just come out and rock to it. So it’s great,” he said.

“Chiiild was this thing that me and Pierre came up with when we were just kind of fed up with the rat race and were like, ‘You know what? Let’s just make the stuff that we think is cool and see what happens,’ and I’ve known from the beginning that it was gonna take time, but what’s amazing about our current situation is that because our core audience loves and has a relationship with the music pretty much fully or, on a spectrum, relatively equally, if something runs away it won’t run beyond. We’ll be able to catch up to it.

“We’ll have a catalogue to support that thing that runs away. I think at this point, anything that happens beyond this particular record we’re ready for it.”

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