If there’s a more reluctant pop star than Ernest Greene, I feel for them. Here is a guy who planned on having “a normal career” and who responded to early offers of live shows by feeling “anxious”. Today, sunning himself in the garden of a stylish east London B&B, the man better known as Washed Out is elaborating on his reticence.

“There are parts [of being a musician] I really enjoy,” he says in a dreamy southern drawl. “But there are also parts where I wish I could just have a 9 to 5 thing. I could count the minutes on one hand where I’ve had time to myself recently so I can just, like, check my email. That’s pretty sad.”

Ah yes, that old longing for the 9 to 5. No doubt it’s what the Stones were thinking as they headed to Nellcôte to record Exile on Main Street. We jest, of course, for if you’ve heard a note of Washed Out’s music, you’ll already have a fair idea that he’s no hellraiser. The 28-year-old makes weird, woozy and – yes – washed-out music from samples and loops and is at the forefront of the “chillwave” scene.

Conjured up largely by shy young men in their bedrooms, chillwave has all the hallmarks of ambient, post-clubbing fodder, yet it is frequently far smarter than that. At its best, the genre plays tricks with our emotions, using sounds that evoke nostalgia for a period that the listener has never lived through. But Greene has always seemed one step ahead of the chillwave crowd. His amateur photography, which was used for his promotional pictures, set the genre’s sun-bleached visual aesthetic and early records such as “Belong” – a kind of reggae-infused mirage – were astonishing, not least because their author wasn’t even trying to get noticed.

“Not at all,” Greene admits. “It was just a very pure pursuit. It was rare I would even share the songs. At no point was I actively reaching out to people.”

Greene grew up in Perry, Georgia, where he immersed himself first in grunge then dance music. By the time he’d moved to college, aged 18, he was making instrumental hip-hop, employing techniques he’d eventually make use of for Washed Out.
It was through his friendship with Chaz Bundick (aka fellow chillwave artist Toro Y Moi) that his songs became the talk of the blogosphere, after Bundick posted one of Greene’s songs on his MySpace page in 2009. He almost grimaces at the memory: “Within a couple of weeks, my songs were all over the internet. Then came the offers to play shows around the world. I was living with my parents and had no money. I was about to get married but had no real idea what to do with my life and I felt quite anxious about things in general. I think the music was a way of dealing with that, which is why the early songs are all about trying to keep a positive outlook on life. But when the live invitations came through, I got anxious again because I had this amazing opportunity but no idea how to start fulfilling it.”

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Greene reckons he’s only now reaching the point where he’s comfortable with his vocation. Which is just as well, really, considering this month sees the release of his debut album, Within and Without.

During the two years since he emerged, however, the chillwave scene has faced something of a backlash, making the success of Within and Without far from a given. Certainly, the album contains some great songs – “Amor Fati”, “A Dedication” – but, at times, it’s so soporific that it borders on background music. A particularly vicious review on the Australian website Collapse Board makes the case that Within and Without is music for the kind of kids you’d find in a Bret Easton Ellis novel. Greene, however, is pragmatic about the less positive reviews.

“Any criticism about the songs sounding the same… there might be some truth to that. I wasn’t trying to write big pop singles. But, to me, the songs come from a very pure place.”

There have been plenty of positive reviews, too, and you do have to feel for Greene a little. One minute, he’s the messiah of a new scene; the next, he’s riding a backlash, while his music has barely changed. Then there’s the controversy around his album sleeve – a shot of an amorous couple that originally accompanied a Cosmopolitan article headlined: “Is this the most satisfying sex position?”

“People thought it was meant to be a provocative statement… but, for me, it shows a very simple, innocent moment between two people.”

I tell Greene that, to me, the photo is almost too clinical to seem innocent – the couple are so beautiful, the moment so perfect, it seems kind of cold.

“I’m comfortable with that interpretation, because it plays even deeper into how I see the album.”

He sees his own album as cold?

“It is a bit cold, the general tone… moving forward, I will try to come up with a warmer sound, because it does seem a bit sterile when I listen now.”

It seems odd that an artist might describe his own music as “sterile”, but Greene likes to analyse his records. He’s a detail fiend, immersing himself in the tiniest rhythmic tricks.

“My wife thinks I’m crazy the amount of times I listen to my songs,” he says. “The way I work is by infinitely playing a very simple loop over and over and then I start layering things. Four hours later, when the same loop is playing…”

You start to hate your own music?

“When you work this intensely on something, the recording process becomes a bit like cabin fever. I shut everything out and, for a while, I totally lost perspective. To an outsider, I imagine the whole recording process sounds like torture.”

To an outsider, it maybe does. But Ernest Greene is no longer an outsider. Perhaps this shy, reluctant pop star is suited to a musician’s life more than he makes out.

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