Fear Fun by Father John Misty

Fear Fun is where Josh Tillman stopped being the quiet guy and became Father John Misty. The debut under that name came out on April 30, 2012, through Bella Union in Britain and Europe and a day later through Sub Pop everywhere else, after Tillman walked away from the drum stool in Fleet Foxes. He produced it with Jonathan Wilson, and it's a hard swerve from the intimate folk he'd been putting out as J. Tillman: looser, louder, psychedelic around the edges and armed with a satirical grin.

"Funtimes in Babylon" is woozy and sun-dazed, "Nancy From Now On" is a smoky, strutting ballad, and "I'm Writing a Novel" gallops along like a shaggy-dog story told at last call. It opened with 4,000 copies in its first week and had reached 83,000 in the US by February 2015.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.