Billy Stuart played guitar in a Northern California hardcore punk band from 2006 to 2010 and in a doom metal band from 2015 to 2019, and Sink With Me is the first release with his own voice on it. The bridge of “Downtrend” explains the change in three lines: “I’m trying to ask for help / And no one’s listening / So I’ll sing.” A guitarist from loud bands starts singing because nobody was listening, and the five songs that follow read as everything he had to say once he did. The two songs released ahead of the EP, “Downtrend” on July 31 and “The Open Door” on September 4, put the narrator’s hardest stretch in public first.
“Downtrend” opens with a narrator spiraling in physical terms, clutching the words someone spoke, trying to “salvage all of the dreams that have broke,” staring at ceilings as they fall to disrepair. The title comes from the language of charts, where a downtrend is a sustained decline, and the song never lets the decline level off. Its refrain asks “How could you take away everything?” and answers itself with “Taken from me,” and the final repeat adds a single word, “now,” so that the loss stops being a memory and becomes the present tense.
“The Open Door” turns the usual escape story inside out. The narrator breaks free from chains and immediately falls to his knees, afraid of the unknown world ahead, and the refrain puts the problem plainly: “Tell me where I’m supposed to go, when this place has been my only home.” Every repetition ends the same way, “when everything around me isn’t real,” until the last one swaps the line for “when this pain is all that’s real.” That swap carries the song. After a whole performance of doubting the world, the narrator settles on the only thing he can be sure of.
“Reprieve” arrives third and uses no words at all. It is the EP’s only instrumental, and its placement after two songs crowded with pleading questions gives the narrator, and the listener, somewhere to put the weight down. The sequence needs that pause, because the next song looks backward.
“Swan Dive” looks back across long years and a relationship that time wore thin: promises to reconnect that fell through, unanswered letters, lines showing in faces, a place “where we used to play.” The title promises a leap, and the lyric stops at the edge of one, with the narrator closing his eyes, breathing in and wondering what “the after has in store.” The EP ends with the song where the narrator’s guilt turns outward. In “Sink With Me,” he asks for the person beside him to “run away from me before I fall,” and the lyric sheet gives the answer in parentheses, “(You’ll sink with me).” The plea and the prediction share the song, and the prediction gets the last word, repeated until it is the only thing left, and the last words of the EP echo its title.
Two people built that sound. Stuart sings and plays acoustic guitar, electric guitar and piano, and Michael Cox plays drums, percussion, bass and strings, co-produces, and engineered, mixed and mastered the record at Uprise Recording in Sacramento between January and March 2026. Acoustic guitar anchors the arrangements, clean electric guitar, piano, bass, drums and strings layer around it, and the intensity of Stuart’s metal past runs underneath the intimate surface, which suits songs written over several years about loss, guilt and acceptance.
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