Lead single ‘I Needed You’ started life as “a sad little break-up waltz” as Edens puts it, but input from collaborators Pat Keen, Shane Leonard and Dex Wolfe lifted the track into something richer and more nuanced. A meditation on the strangeness of an aftermath, when nothing is as it used to feel and anger and longing are impossible split. “It’s about trying to discover and center your own needs when sometimes it’s easier to lie to yourself and ignore them,” Edens explains. “It’s about perhaps not even knowing what you need and being okay with that.” The result is an ambiguous space between the past and the future. A place where nothing is solid, and is therefore both terrifying and thrilling all at once.

Wasn’t kind of you, wasn’t always true when
I needed you
How cruel to be, this kind of free when
I needed you

Photo by Elizabeth Ibarra

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The idiosyncratic sound works in harmony with the themes of the EP. The release draws its name from what Wolfe sees as the oscillation between positive and negative baked into the human experience, and how our current shadowed state still displays evidence of the other side. What he describes as the “process of being in a dark part of the cycle, but being rebirthed in light like we are every day.” With help from Pat Keen (bass) and Jack Lussenden (drums), this sentiment is brought life through curiosity and strangeness, a constant propensity for the unexpected, for change, that both captures the pessimism of the moment and the brightness beyond its boundaries.

Lead single and opener ‘Lightning’ makes this apparent, an inventive track that blends a surreal floaty ambience with a frenetic lyrical flow. “I wrote [the song] while sitting on a bridge in Eau Claire, Wisconsin,” Wolfe explains. “I was awestruck by a massive golden lightning storm that intricately painted the entire horizon in the distance.” But despite this sublime natural display, many pedestrians on the bridge barely looked up from their phones. “The juxtaposition of these two events felt so acute,” Wolfe continues, “as if being offered up as an archetype of western civilization in the 21st century.”

There’s more of a traditional folk rock vibe to ‘Little Car’, though the apparent simplicity of opening rhythm branches out with a searching intricacy, while ‘Highly Likely’ positions itself in an altogether more intangible space. Exploring the ambiguous territory between escapism and destruction, in particular in a context of addiction, Wolfe’s vocals arrive soft and fragile above the art pop discordance. However, they eventually pulled into the glitching confusion of the sound itself with the searching refrain—Why can’t we be alright?—ending the track with no judgement or wisdom.

‘Love Breaks’ emerges from the chaos with a meandering calm, a laid-back lounge jazz made almost surreal by its positioning. The escape itself perhaps, cut off from the noise and movement of the world but always temporary. Indeed, the EP can function as a loop itself, the peace of the closing track feeding back into the manic twitch of the opener, the wax and wane of life we have to live.

Lightness is out now and available from the Dex Wolfe Bandcamp page.

Artwork and photography by Leeya Rose Jackson

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