Ellis King spent a decade writing before releasing a single note publicly. That kind of patience tends to produce a certain type of songwriter: one who values precision over volume, who knows the difference between a lyric that sounds right and one that actually is. All That Comes After, her sophomore EP out February 20 via Nettwerk, was written under opposite conditions — in real time, during a breakup, during displacement, during the particular disorientation of a life that won’t hold still. The tension between those two versions of Ellis King is what makes the record worth sitting with.
Written in Sydney alongside producer and songwriter Alex Burnett, whose credits include work with Thelma Plum and Alison Wonderland, the five tracks move through what King herself describes as the stages of grief, though the sequencing never feels schematic. The emotional logic is messier and more honest than that framing suggests.
“Nosedive” opens mid-action, the relationship already over, Ellis packing up in the dead of night without putting up a fight. The sharpest lyric arrives in the second verse: “I’d set my contrast to dull / he said my lustre made him feel small / I don’t know why I felt so ashamed of that.” The shame is the point. The song doesn’t linger in anger at him so much as in bewilderment at herself, at how thoroughly she’d internalized his smallness as her problem to manage. By the time the chorus settles into “the world spins madly on and so do I,” the resignation has curdled into something closer to relief.
“Emergency Contact” is where the record’s emotional specificity hits hardest. The administrative act of updating a form, replacing an ex’s number with her mum’s, shouldn’t be able to carry the weight King puts on it, and yet it does. “You had to wait to see fire / but I already tasted the fumes” is the kind of line that lands because it’s earned by what precedes it, the months of re-learning how to breathe, the soft person slowly getting harder. The arrangement’s gentle country lean, plucked strings evoking a home that no longer exists, earns its place without overselling.
“Hold My Breath” is the EP’s most vocally demanding moment, and King’s top range handles the weight of it with a fragility that never tips into fragility for its own sake. The perspective shift mid-song is quietly devastating: the first verse imagines what could have blossomed, the second flips to his point of view, “you’ve been praying for the rain / to wash me from your clothes.” The fruit falling from the tree and going rotten is a small, precise image doing large emotional work.
“fitymi” introduces a sharper pop edge, stark rhythmic piano opening into the EP’s most uptempo stretch. The lyric earns its hook through accumulated self-knowledge rather than catchiness alone, stacking failures like mountains of matches, smoke filling the lungs, before arriving at something genuinely hard-won: waking up next to someone and feeling fine, actually fine, not as a performance but as a fact.
Closer “The Blueprint” pays off everything that precedes it. “All those other guys were reproductions and spies / tied hastily with a ribbon and sold as bona fide” is the EP’s wittiest writing, and it’s followed immediately by its most tender: drinking wine from one glass, love that knows no ceiling, a house being built and kept. “Who was I to question the gift of the lesson” lands because King has spent four tracks earning the right to say it.
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