Isaac Martinez describes music as his major side quest. His actual mission, becoming a better person for his family, takes precedence. That framing is both self-deprecating and precise, and it explains something about how Insider Art, his new five-track EP, was made. This is not a record built for industry consumption. It’s built because Martinez builds records the way some people keep journals, compulsively and honestly, with the accumulated weight of someone who started composing songs at eleven and hasn’t really stopped since.
The Denver musician’s catalog is genuinely difficult to map. More than a dozen DIY releases since 2016, a stretch in Los Angeles with a Brockhampton and Beatles-inspired band that accumulated enough momentum to justify its own implosion, a habit of obsessively working material across multiple genres and then quietly wiping it from the internet. Some tunes are too important not to last. The ones that make it through that process tend to be the ones worth hearing.
Insider Art arrives as five songs about the frustration of his life right now. He’s quick to add that there’s a lot of good too, which is the kind of qualification that matters when the music is this candid. The EP was produced by Martinez with the same A-list engineering assistance that shaped 10 Country Songs, his previous full-length, with Grammy-winner Jerry Ordonez and Andy Flebbe in his corner. The production quality gives the EP a finish that the rawness of the material earns rather than contradicts.
The EP contains multitudes in the way Martinez’s work always has. Shoegaze, garage rock, IDM, alternative, Americana, math rock, hip-hop, pop: these are not just influences he namedrops but territories he actually moves through, sometimes within the same release. Insider Art includes a hype rap track built around a Pink Floyd sample, which in less capable hands would be a gimmick and in Martinez’s hands is simply another tool for the emotional work the EP is doing. That a record described as five songs about frustration contains both that kind of track and whatever “Ben” is points to an artist who doesn’t consider genre coherence a constraint worth honoring.
“Comedy” opens the EP with the self-awareness the title suggests. Martinez has enough distance from his own situation to frame it as comedy, which is either coping or clarity or both. “Ben” follows as the most immediately accessible track on the record, the kind of song that earns the description without sacrificing the complexity underneath it. The name as a title suggests specificity, a person or a moment rather than a state, and whatever the song is about it sits in the EP’s emotional center without dominating it.
“Fearless,” featuring Tyreek Terrell, brings a collaborator into the framework and, with them, a different energy than the solo tracks carry. “Gliding,” featuring Langue D’amour, extends that collaborative register, the title suggesting a different tempo than the frustration the EP opened with, a moment of something less fraught within the larger difficult stretch the record documents. “People Worth Protesting” closes with a title that carries both defiance and exhaustion, the EP ending not on resolution but on the specific fatigue of caring about things that require caring.
Twenty-one minutes is a precise amount of time for this kind of honesty. Martinez has spent years making music across genres and aliases and then pulling it back from the internet, and Insider Art feels like something he intends to keep. The frustration is real. So is the good.
Insider Art is available now.
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