Back in 2024, Oakland, California-based songwriter Richard Tripps released Between the Morning, a full-length recorded in a tent in Big Sur which allowed the drama and scale of the surroundings to bleed into the very fabric of the songs. The album, initially slated as demoes, instead leant into the imperfection, channelling “the lo-fi aesthetic of The Range of Light, The Velvet Underground, White Fence and early Oh Sees,” we wrote in our review, “in order to better evoke the environment where the songs were conceived […] leading the audience away from the busy environment of their heads and towards something more expansive and peaceful.”
The songs of Between the Morning were not the only material recorded during that period, and now Richard Tripps has returned with new EP Stone Eating Animals, a release which both concludes that period of his career and further lets us into the world he has created. The title track “shows the result is every bit as evocative and atmospheric as we’ve come to expect,” we wrote in a preview back in June. “A playful, swaggering slice of slacker rock from the coastal mountains of California, delivered with something between carefree buoyancy and a more ambiguous sense of reflection.”
Now the entire EP has been released and the rest of the songs are just as impressive, switching up the tempo while maintaining the overall ambience. Opener ‘Objects Are Closer’ sits at the energetic end of the spectrum, a song which manages to pair racing rhythm with enveloping fuzz, packing a punch while maintaining a languid slacker cool. But any laidback vibe is blown away by the subsequent tracks, which are practically horizontal in comparison. ‘I Wanna Be The Moth’ moseys along like the fanciful flutter of its titular insect, while ‘You Me and Julie’ and ‘Tall Grass’ offer a similarly charming sunbaked flow. All of the tracks are recorded via Tascam 424 Portstudio and are stronger for it, the woozy tones and matte finish again evoking a landscape in which the real and surreal merge into something as tactile as it is strange.
Stone Eating Animals is out now and available from the Richard Tripps Bandcamp page.