Fourteen years is a long time to leave something unfinished. By Million Wires, the atmospheric alternative rock project founded by Tarnów-based guitarist and vocalist Mirek Skrok, returns from that silence with Not Over, a five-track debut EP that sounds less like a first release and more like a reckoning with everything that accumulated during the wait. The title is its own statement of intent. Whatever was interrupted is not resolved. It’s only now finding its voice.
The sonic approach is built on repeating, hypnotic guitar figures, wide delays, and cinematic arrangements that move between fragility and force. The production philosophy mirrors the emotional logic of the songs: intimate and clean in the verses, distorted and post-rock in the crescendos, the tension between those two states generating most of the drama. For fans of Riverside, Death Cab for Cutie, or early Coldplay, the reference points are close enough to orient without being a constraint.
“Over” opens the EP and earns the weight the title carries. A persistent guitar ostinato establishes the track’s hypnotic foundation before Skrok’s vocals arrive with the intimacy of someone speaking directly rather than performing. “There is no regret over indecision” is the kind of lyric that sits differently depending on how much time you’ve spent with a decision you didn’t make, and the song builds from that quiet opening into a thunderous post-rock outro that makes the full emotional arc of a fourteen-year silence audible in a single track.
“Glass Houses” follows with jangly guitars and haunting vocals, the fragile reality of the title imagery matched by an arrangement that feels on the verge of shattering throughout. The aspiration toward a better world, even a fabricated one, runs underneath the song with the particular quality of something genuinely felt rather than constructed for effect.
“I Know Better” is the EP’s most immediately distinctive track. The triple-meter rhythm gives it a sway that separates it from the more straightforward 4/4 material surrounding it, and the decision to move toward warm, clean guitar tones rather than the rawer textures of the opener creates a contrast that works in the sequencing. The song is about the specific frustration of having your path steered by others, and the lyric “it’s hardly California to leave” captures the gap between the scale of the feeling and the actual geography of the decision with a precision that lands harder than a more grandiose image would. The “wash me away” sequence builds into the hazy guitar swirls that give the song its dreamy quality without losing the intimacy of the vocal delivery underneath.
“Lost or Won” extends the EP’s themes of autonomy and survival, the lyrical perspectives on past and future arriving at “don’t surrender to anyone” with the conviction of a line that the three preceding tracks have earned. By the time “Runaway” closes the record with its post-punk bass and shimmering guitars, the EP has moved through its emotional arc with enough internal logic that the ending feels arrived at rather than appended.
Not Over is a debut that carries fourteen years of unfinished business without being crushed by it. Skrok has built these songs around the tension between what gets contained and what gets released, and the production gives both states equal weight. The atmospheric textures are genuinely cinematic in the way that word usually just means pretty, but here means something closer to narratively driven, each track a movement in a larger story that the band is only beginning to tell.
Not Over is available now.
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