We first featured Ringwood band Exam Season back in 2016, when we wrote about their debut EP Mostly Homely. The record, a “decidedly British twee indie rock [combined with] electronic-flavoured pop and some emo tinges,” represented “something both serious and not,” blending fun and thought to explore “the banalities of life alongside some really important questions of identity and meaning.”
The good news is that Exam Season are back with a new EP, smol, a release they say is about “the anxiety that comes with feeling your youth slipping away… fueled by Paul McCartney interviews, emo memes and strawberry milk.” But Exam Season aren’t interested in capturing these anxieties with mumbly mope-core. Instead, they throw their gazes back to the sparkly jewel of childhood, creating pop songs with influences ranging from Modern Baseball and Snail Mail to 5SOS and Charli XCX.
Lead single ‘strawberry milk’ is a song about once finding solace in music and Yazoo, and how even that simple pleasure has been taken from us by traffic light nutritional information and the twenty-first century persecution of sugar. Of course, the song is about more than just milkshake, its comforting sickly embrace standing in for any number of former pleasures that have been snatched away. It’s more about pining for things in the past, when the answers to your problems were as simple as, you guessed it, strawberry milk.
“Life hasn’t been fine,
Since it was okay,
To drink Strawberry Milk,
Everyday”
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And this is the overarching theme of the record, gazing back at simpler times with a wistful sigh as a kind of escapism from our modern woes. As Watson describes:
“It’s all about growing up, but specifically it’s about missing childhood—not adolescence and the hormonal shift period, but what came before. I miss ringing home phones and awkwardly asking friends if they want to come play. I miss cookies for breakfast. I miss 5ive. Ultimately, the EP is naively childlike in a time where everything sucks, or at least is perceived to. Really, I just want to be as smol as a puppy again, I think we all do.”
As if to prove this point, ‘Cool Beans’ is an emotive indie rock song about getting older but never quite growing up. “You personify our cuddly toys, the food on our plates, the dust on the floor,” Watson sings, “At first I couldn’t see, but now you make me weep at the sight of a lonely pea.” Closing track ‘Black Candle Flame’ is probably the EP’s most reserved moment, Watson’s modulated vocals soft and sincere over minimal percussion and quiet guitar. It’s a song that compares past fears (horror movies and Hocus Pocus) to current ones, namely that ever-present shadow of mortality.
“I fear cancer, tinnitus and dust.
And I’m told that WebMD,
Can’t cure me, immediately.
I am scared,
I’ll always be scared”
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You can get smol now on LP or download from the Exam Season Bandcamp page.
