“Shapeshifter” opens on a single bent guitar note from Sködt McNalty, a drone that keeps sliding and refuses to settle, and 5th PROJEKT builds the whole song on that instability. The Toronto band cut it live off the floor at The Sugar Shack in London for the Incorrect Thoughts live series, one of five songs on the Live In London EP.
David Pake’s heavy, repetitive drumming and Peter Broadley’s snarling fuzz bass lock in underneath the drone. Then Tara Rice enters with a calm chant fed through a delay, so every line she sings comes back a beat later as its own reply.
Rice’s lyric is short and barely changes, and the band trusts that. Its central line works as a defense: “We’ve got our own skin / Don’t mean we’re not right.” The transformation lives in the line breaks. As the phrase repeats, its final word gets pushed onto a line of its own, so skin peels away from the sentence the way a snake’s old skin peels away from the snake. Between that split and the delay, each phrase leaves a copy of itself behind.
The approach works because the band never hurries the change. Repetition builds into momentum as all four players push the drone toward a full psychedelic surge, and with no studio fixes waiting afterward, the recording catches the shift as it happens. A song about changing shape gets exactly one take to do it, and 5th PROJEKT makes the most of it.
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