Described as “b-sides that didn’t fit on my last EP or next album” ‘Wash Behind Your Ears’ and ‘Back’ are a pair of new singles from Brooklyn songwriter Lina K.O. Well, perhaps new is slightly misleading. ‘Wash Behind Your Ears’ was initially written way back in 2018 but stubbornly refused to find a place on Lina K.O.’s last EP Earth Apple.
We previously described the EP as a “collection of songs where melancholy and something like fondness constantly compete and intersect,” and the mood of ‘Wash Behind Your Ears’ follows a similar thread, if perhaps from a slightly different position. One where the quest for acceptance of present conditions is dropped in favour of allowing one’s wishes to be voiced aloud, leading to catharsis if nothing else. The sound itself lives up to this sense of release, building into something tumultuous by the end. “It’s a song for getting overwhelmed, burnt out, and disillusioned,” as Lina K.O. puts it, “and wanting (viscerally) to see nature and talk to no one and hear no neighbours or construction and breathe clean air and do nothing and feel human.”
‘Back’, on the other hand, is a new song, but once that doesn’t fit with K.O.’s forthcoming record. A song about nostalgia, it is perhaps unsurprisingly both quite different from its predecessor and eerily similar. Written by two versions of the same person over five years apart, but the same person nonetheless. A guitar loop serves as the origin of the track, though again it builds with the sense of release, escalating beyond its initial patterns to add a tangible depth.
Wash Behind Your Ears / Back is out now via the Lina K.O. Bandcamp page.