We first came across ACAB Rocky through their split with Kneedlez (a release we featured on our Favourite Free Music of 2014 list), and now the Victoria trio are back with a release on Michigan’s Hacktivism Records.

Truce sounds like a real progression from their previous releases, with a lush mix of lo-fi shoegaze, indie pop and 90s emo creating tracks filled with riffs and vocal hooks. Opener ‘Matches’ plays like The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart fed through a math-y filter, with the refrain “I don’t know what you’re up to or up against” proving maddeningly catchy. ‘Nursery’ slows things down, opening with some admirable guitar work and developing into a laid-back song that dips a toe into psychedelic waters, before ‘Stella’, my current favourite, returns to the pop/shoegaze sound of ‘Matches’. ‘Stella’ typifies everything that makes Truce a success, a summer evening of a track, relaxed and slow and gilded with fading light, sad in a nostalgic sort of way.

This trend is continued across ‘Jane’, fuzzed-out synths providing a more immediate atmosphere, and ‘Backwoods’, where the drums become a little more ramshackle and free, straying toward garage rock territory. This all changes for closing track ‘Don’, the most minimalist on the EP, the focus on guitar and vocals bringing to mind the title tracks from last year’s album Sara.

Truce sounds like the sort of EP you will want to play as darkness falls in the warmer months, just sad enough to satisfy that weird sort of comfortable melancholy that descends with the summer sun. You can grab it now via the Hacktivism Bandcamp page, including on a rather lovely purple cassette.

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You can download Dead Air on a pay-what-you-want basis via the Blush Response Bandcamp page.

P.S Blush Response released another EP earlier this year. Check out Telltale over at Bandcamp.

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The song, ‘Post Holiday Dead Song’ is a scuzzy lo-fi pop song that sounds like The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart meets Johnny Foreigner. It will be accompanied by Joanna Gruesome’s ‘Anti-Parent Cowboy Killers,’ a track taken from last year’s album Weird Sister, on a 7″ that has some of the best artwork I’ve seen in a long while.

You can pre-order the split from Odd Box Records here. Also, be sure to check out their previous EP, Pure // Apart, on Bandcamp.

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