Joey Puleio and Chris Kyle started Extra Space by cleaning out a practice space. The story is worth repeating because it says something true about what the project has become: music made by two people who found a chemistry in an ordinary moment and decided to follow it. Their debut Green Season established the vocabulary, Midwest emo guitar work threaded through folk atmospheres, self-produced with a band-in-a-room quality that felt intentional rather than limited. New Colors, the sophomore record, is what happens when that chemistry stops being discovered and starts being trusted.
The album opens with “Never Wanted,” described by the band as scattered, taken in the wind like pieces of foam. It’s a specific and unusual image for how a record begins, and it suggests an intent to capture something before it coheres rather than after. The song’s unsettled quality is structural rather than accidental, which is a harder thing to pull off than arriving with a firm statement. From there, the album moves through eight tracks over twenty-eight minutes, finding weight and beauty in what it calls the “new colors” of ordinary experience.
That phrase, new colors, is doing real work. It’s not about novelty or discovery in the conventional sense but about perception, the way familiar things reveal new dimensions depending on where you’re standing and what you’ve been through. The record is preoccupied with time as something experienced unevenly, moments that should feel mundane carrying unexpected gravity, and moments that should feel significant slipping past. “Twenty-Four” sits early in the tracklist as a number that arrives before you’re ready for it, and “Spiral” carries the circular quality its title promises, the session video for it showing how the track moves through the band physically before it moves through the listener.
The guitar work across the record continues what made Green Season worth following. Intricate, arpeggiated playing that shifts between Midwest emo tendencies and something more plateau-like and scenic without announcing the transitions. The rhythm section provides what the band calls an off-kilter but precise backbone, and that description captures something real: the drums and bass give the songs enough structure to feel anchored while leaving enough room for the arrangements to breathe unexpectedly. Puleio and Kyle’s vocals remain soft and close-miked in the tradition of the project, which keeps even the more textured tracks feeling personal rather than produced.
“Wallflower” and “Something Strange” occupy the album’s midsection with titles that continue the record’s interest in presence and the uncanny, the sense of something familiar made slightly strange. “Elevator” has the particular quality of contained time, a space you’re in briefly that feels both mundane and suspended, which suits an album about the perception of ordinary moments. “Paper Thin” carries the fragility that phrase always implies, but in the context of this record, it reads less as vulnerability than as precision, the ability to make something that holds its shape despite the lightest materials.
The album ends with “Babble,” a song about making a pot of soup while a new baby plays nearby. As closing images go, it’s disarmingly specific and genuinely earned. The arc the band describes, from scattered foam at the opening to domestic warmth at the close, traces a particular kind of human journey without mapping it too explicitly. New life changes the perception of ordinary time. The soup still needs to be made. The new colors are everywhere if you’re looking.
The band’s own assessment of New Colors as the first real fruition of the Extra Space project tracks with what the record demonstrates. Green Season found the sound. This album inhabits it with a confidence that only comes from having done the work already once and knowing what you’re building toward the second time.
New Colors is available June 26.
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