B-Side Guys

A remix EP usually exists to squeeze a little more mileage out of songs that have already made their case. Make Believe (Smoky Remix) has bigger ambitions than that. Todd Parker, the band’s founder, shares mixing and resequencing duties this time with Cameron Karren at Sacramento’s Pus Cavern Studio, and the EP closes on “Brights and Shades,” a newly written instrumental built around string arrangements from violinist Gillian Rivers, whose credits run through Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Kim Gordon, Angel Olsen, and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Four remixes and one new original track is a different proposition than a straight victory-lap remix package, and Parker has described the intent directly: “These mixes take the songs somewhere new, more atmospheric, more cinematic. It’s like seeing the same landscape at dusk instead of daylight.”

That reframing makes sense given how the original Make Believe came together in the first place, a reunion of old friends in the Poconos that turned into an unintentional comeback record almost by accident, after two decades apart spent on separate paths: Parker releasing solo work, bassist David Max joining the art and music collective Psychic TV, guitarist Nick Kramer moving into production work with MGMT, Panda Bear, and Sonic Boom. That last name matters here specifically, since Sonic Boom, of Spacemen 3 and Spectrum, mixed the original 2025 EP himself, putting Tadpoles’ comeback in direct contact with one of space rock’s actual architects rather than just adjacent to the genre by association. The band’s own history backs that lineage up further than any comparison to current psych-pop acts could. Parker started Tadpoles as a home recording project in the 1980s before Max and Kramer joined him to form a live band in New York in 1992, and the trio spent the following decade building a catalog that included a 1994 debut on their own Hoboken label and a 1996 follow-up that earned a rare four-star Rolling Stone review from Jim DeRogatis for a self-released record, alongside an affiliation with the Australian psych imprint Camera Obscura before the band split at the turn of the millennium.

“Something Sparkly,” the lead track and the only song here that’s also circulating as a separate radio edit, sets the remix EP’s terms early, reverb pushed out until the vocals sit somewhere behind the mix rather than in front of it, synths reaching for something closer to atmosphere than melody. “Vinous,” “When Fire Was New,” and “Bronze Silver Iron” carry that same reworking through the middle of the EP, each one a transformed version of a track from the original release rather than a new composition, expanding arrangements that were already loose into something looser still.

Closer “Brights and Shades” earns its place as the EP’s real statement. Building an entirely new track around a guest violinist rather than remixing an existing one signals that this project wasn’t conceived as a simple repackaging exercise, and Rivers’ string work gives the record a texture nothing else in the Tadpoles catalog has reached for before. Coming from a band gearing up for Timeseeker, a fourteen-song double vinyl LP due in February 2027, this remix EP works as a testing ground rather than a stopgap, four familiar songs pushed into new shapes and one brand new idea planted at the end to see what grows.

---

Make Believe (Smoky Remix) is available now.