Three EPs in three years is a fast pace for a band this committed to specificity, and EP3 earns that pace by staying locked onto one real question: what does it cost to keep functioning inside a world that keeps giving you reasons not to. The three singles carry that question in its most direct forms. “New Year, New Hell” sets it against actual Los Angeles geography, torn-up carousels and new light rail lines standing in for a city that can’t decide what it’s protecting, the song narrowing all that civic unease down to one plea to be held through it. “Roulette” turns the same anxiety violent and immediate, “I looked both ways before I stepped” repeating like a survival ritual against a world where danger arrives at random, and its use of live-streamed tragedy as ambient noise, “fake video streaming real humans in costume,” lands harder than the hook it’s built around. “Doesn’t Feel Like Home Anymore” earns its promised hopeful bend the hard way, tracking a panic attack in real time during a trip abroad before choosing, without much conviction, to come home anyway, closing on the plain admission that even the people waiting there might not feel settled either.
The EP’s real reward, though, sits in the three songs built to work without a chorus doing the heavy lifting. “Expensive Speech” opens as a strikingly strange bit of pet-owner theology, wondering aloud whether a dog granted dominion has dominion of its own, before a hard visual break in the lyric sheet drops the song into a completely different register: short, barked commands, roll over, take a walk, sic ’em, landing on the flattest line on the whole EP, you will do exactly what is asked if it will pay the rent. The trick is that the song never says who’s actually being commanded. By the second half, it’s no longer clear whether the dog is the subject or the metaphor, and that ambiguity is the whole point, wage labor dressed up in obedience-training language until the two are indistinguishable.
“The Tower” runs the shortest and hits the hardest of the deep cuts, built on a single act of self-catching hypocrisy. The narrator insists twice that he’s over chasing confidence and status, then admits outright, wait, I lied, before demanding money, power, and proximity to the tower anyway. It’s a thirty-second confession dressed as a two-minute song, its repetition working as the sound of someone failing to talk themselves out of the exact thing they just claimed to have quit. “The Conveyor” closes the deep cuts out with the EP’s most patient writing, using the image of an actual assembly line to describe a life spent in constant, exhausting motion without forward progress, “stillness in persistence is a sacrifice.” Its best line pushes back directly against a genre cliché, dismissing the idea that pain automatically builds character, whoever sold you that story never had to live with the cost of it. The song ends without resolving its own central bind, wanting to feel both safe and free at once when the EP has already made clear neither one comes guaranteed.
Recorded in a weekend and mixed over the months after, EP3 carries an urgency that outruns any sense of being rushed, three years into a project clearly more interested in staying honest about the present than polishing itself into something timeless. The singles will get people in the door. The deep cuts are where the band actually finishes its argument.
EP3 is available now.
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