B-Side Guys

Memory photographs lie with the most beautiful precision. The First Eloi understand this cruel truth intimately on “In Sepia,” where their intergenerational lineup—two noise and postpunk veterans anchoring a younger vocalist—creates sonic archaeology from emotional debris.

The reversed guitar textures that the band mentions serve as more than mere production flourish; they function as temporal displacement, making familiar melodies feel like half-remembered dreams. This deliberate disorientation mirrors the lyrical territory, where “pictures deceaving” becomes both literal observation and existential statement. The shoegaze framework provides perfect cover for this exploration, allowing waves of distortion to blur the edges between past and present.

Their vocalist navigates the contradiction between permanent impermanence with striking vulnerability. “Your smile keeps shining in sepia forever” captures photography’s false promise—that moments can be preserved when they’re actually being transformed into something else entirely. The repetition of “around me wherever” suggests haunting rather than comfort, presence that exists only through absence.

The musical arrangement supports this thematic weight through careful restraint. Where many shoegaze acts pile on layers for sheer overwhelm, The First Eloi create space within their density. The slower tempo mentioned in their notes allows each reversed guitar phrase to breathe, to establish its own gravitational pull before the next wave arrives. This pacing feels essential to the song’s emotional logic—rushing would undermine the meditation on how memory actually works.

Following their 2023 EP “Low Glow,” this track suggests a band growing more confident in their ability to balance noise veterans’ textural knowledge with pop instincts. The result occupies that rare shoegaze territory where beauty and unease coexist without resolution, where “turning into unbliss” becomes not just lyrical phrase but sonic experience. The H.G. Wells reference in their background feels less like pretension and more like honest admission: they’re time travelers too, just working in reverse.