Ea Othilde is twenty one years old from Oslo and has already had two albums nominated for Norway’s top music prize. Her new EP You’ll Leave This City is five tracks and nineteen minutes long, and it’s absolutely captivating. Romantic and wistful dream pop with consistently surprising choices without being weird for weird’s sake, there’s something intriguing about Othilde’s chord choices, song structures and melodic delivery that pulls you in and keeps you there.

Very understandable songs with great choruses that are somehow completely unformulaic, City of Love opens the EP with a huge messy cloud of guitar harmonics before snapping into focus like an elastic band. It’s romantic, dreamy and slightly disorienting and I Forgot You carries that same quality of the unexpected with strange bar lengths and a consistently surprising harmonic language. Room #21 has a line about being raised in anger that hits like a train, and is then left to hang in the air over doubled vocals from a delay pedal that feel like thought bubbles of half-formed ideas. Florence is beautiful, intimate and contemplative, and It Only Makes Me Bitter closes the EP with nimble drumming and a sunny richness to the instrumentation and the melodies. It’s quite hard to pin down what’s so intriguing about the music on You’ll Leave The City, but it has the quality of a songwriter who’s paying very close attention to every detail without leting it show. Gentle, engaging and dreamy, it sounds effortless and magical. With so much accomplished music already behind her, Ea Othilde is worth paying very close attention to, and what makes the music work is not technical complexity, but unexpected chord changes and meticulous production decisions. There’s a sense that Othilde has thought very carefully about exactly how each element should sound and then made it sound effortless and light. A serious talent.