The title of MUKI’s debut EP comes from a question he couldn’t shake: have you ever seen anyone sad on a trampoline? The Melbourne artist born from that question has built four songs around the tension the image contains, the strangeness of joy tied to childhood, the way a memory can hold both innocence and pain at once. Trampoline is an EP about the emotional in-between, the moments that resist simple categorization, and the particular honesty required to write about anxiety, heartbreak, and growth without flattening any of them into something more manageable.
Produced alongside Josh Barber, the record moves through soft guitars, fingerpicked arrangements, and layered harmonies with an understated quality that suits the material. MUKI’s voice is the thing Triple J’s Claire Mooney called a gorgeous and very sincere moment, and Sounds of Oz described as moving effortlessly from passionate rasp to airy falsetto, and it earns those descriptions across all four tracks without repeating itself.
“My Sweet Anxiety” opens the EP with fingerpicked guitar, light percussion, and a soft vocal delivery that captures the push and pull of living alongside anxiety more precisely than the title alone suggests. “All of the dreams I had were suddenly falling down / all of my thoughts were shouting in caps on the ground” arrives with the specific quality of an anxious mind described from the inside rather than from outside looking in. The lyric “close your eyes / and just keep breathing go slow” offers the kind of reassurance that knows it won’t entirely work but offers it anyway. By the end the song arrives at “I’ll just let my heart beat fast and slow,” which is acceptance rather than resolution, an important distinction.
“Gasoline” is where the EP turns toward heartbreak, the slow unravelling of a relationship examined through one of the record’s most patient arrangements. “We put in gasoline / we put in branches of wood / we put in anything we thought could make this fire burn” is the kind of extended metaphor that lands because it doesn’t overexplain itself, the bonfire that couldn’t be saved doing the emotional work without editorial commentary. “It’s not your fault / and it shouldn’t feel like mine” is the song’s most honest moment, the mutual recognition of something that failed without blame landing on either side.
“Reflections” turns inward to identity and the weight of choices already made. “So many mirrors on the wall / all these reflections are my own” opens a song about the self as accumulated decision, each turn taken or not taken still visible in what you’ve become. “At every turn I chose to be / the man who turned out to be me” carries both ownership and uncertainty, and the repeated question “would those reflections change / would I still be the same?” keeps arriving without a definitive answer because there isn’t one. The lush instrumentation and intricate guitar work give the track a fullness that matches the gravity of the subject.
“Morning Music” closes the EP by splitting its perspective across two characters, a woman waiting for the sun and a man waiting for a 5am train, each carrying their own version of the same desire to disappear and the same slow discovery that they’re stronger than they thought. The track builds from laid-back acoustic textures into something that earns the description of stadium-sized release without betraying the intimacy the EP established in its first three songs. “Listen to the morning music / listen to the morning rain / listen to the birds they chatter / don’t let them be alone today” is a quiet instruction that the whole EP has been building toward.
Four songs, twenty-one minutes, a debut that knows what it wants to say and trusts the listener to sit with it.
Trampoline is available now. MUKI plays the EP launch at Shotkickers, Melbourne, on June 20.
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