Experimental-pop artist Carδamo explores the power of collaboration, community and creative freedom on new mixtape ‘Tomodachi ☆ Kimitachi’, an ambitious collection that brings together commercial pop songwriting and adventurous, genre-defying production.

Funded by The Roundhouse Resident Artist Program and Youth Music’s NXT Gen Fund, the project spans a diverse sonic landscape, moving between alternative pop, contemporary R&B, hyperpop and electronic experimentation. Featuring tracks including ‘Cat & Mouse’, ‘One More Night’, ‘Over It’, ‘Mundial’ and ‘Best Of Me’, the mixtape showcases an artist unafraid to challenge conventional pop structures while maintaining a strong melodic sensibility.

Across the collection, Carδamo demonstrates an instinct for reinvention. ‘One More Night’ and ‘Best Of Me’ lean into alternative pop, while ‘Blackstar Promo’ introduces hyperpop and bubblegum bass through pitch-shifted vocals, jittery synth melodies and bright synthetic textures. Elsewhere, ‘Confidence’ delivers a contemporary R&B sound driven by grooving bass, rich vocal lines, soaring strings and sharp lead guitar flourishes that play against the chorus melodies. ‘La La La’ takes a warmer, sun-soaked approach, pairing lush harmonies and hazy electronic elements to create a distinctly retro atmosphere.

At the heart of the mixtape is focus track ‘Missing Link’, which brings organic instrumentation into dialogue with electronic production. Blending sampling, free-flowing vocal lines and a driving breakbeat, the track captures the project’s wider ambition to unite contrasting sounds into something cohesive and unpredictable.

For Carδamo, however, the mixtape’s identity extends beyond its musical experimentation. The project is rooted in the relationships and creative partnerships that have shaped the artist’s personal and artistic development, marking a shift towards greater confidence and a more open approach to collaboration.

“I wrote this mixtape with community in mind. It was a love-letter to collaboration as a whole. I attempted to do the same thing with the first body of music I ever created when I was 19, and it didn’t really go to plan, fallings out and what have you… Typical things you go through at a tender age. This new mixtape embodies the security and joy I’ve found in newer relationships forged with my “adult” self, a freer person with much more self-confidence.

I recorded it almost entirely at my home studio in Farnborough, where I live with my Dad; we built it together during lockdown while I was studying my music undergrad at Surrey University. However, due to some fantastic opportunities I’ve been given, I’ve held sessions in London, New York, LA, and Nicosia, all in which collaboration shaped some of the songs on this project.

What really inspired me was music from the likes of Frost Children, Danny L Harle & Underscores. That type of dance music with a hint of silliness that I believe can cure the dance floor of the poser-attitude that seems to infect the underground alt-scenes in party cities.”

The resulting collection reflects an approach to pop that embraces both precision and unpredictability, finding room for playful dance-floor energy alongside more unconventional production choices. Its international recording sessions also speak to the collaborative spirit at the centre of the project, with ideas developed across different cities and creative environments before coming together as a unified body of work.

With roots in classical music and a longstanding love of jazz, Cardamon Rozzi, known professionally as Carδamo, occupies a space between accessible pop and experimental composition. That balance has been shaped by an interest in the structures and freedoms of music, as well as the discovery of noise, acousmaticism and indeterminism as ways of processing creativity.

Describing the appeal of this boundary-pushing approach, Carδamo calls it “music that’s both ugly and hot.” It is a fitting description for an artist drawn to the tension between the familiar and the unexpected, where polished melodies can coexist with abrasive textures and dance-floor immediacy can meet sonic disarray.

Listen to the new mixtape below:

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