There’s a new wave of guitar music coming out of Australia that carries the warmth of the climate without necessarily sounding happy, dealing honestly with human relationships and the complexity of the world as it currently is. It takes a lot for us to feature a sixteen minute EP, but this latest release from sleepazoid is so impressive that it’s left us wide eyed for whatever comes next.

In four songs and an interlude they cover remarkable ground, holding shoegaze, indie rock, alt-grunge and something approaching rockabilly together all at once. The emotional range is equally vast, with an instinctive understanding of the musical tension between loud and quiet, fast and slow, and the emotional tension between happiness, sadness and longing. The EP opens with the gorgeous and forlorn 3AM beginning in indie rock territory and carrying dreamy and melancholy qualities before blasting into a massive chorus. The chords are doing interesting emotional work throughout and creating a complexity of feeling. NEW AGE tears away at a completely different pace, super fast in the verses with vocal lines shouted with no concern for melody, just urgency and forward momentum. The chorus then arrives and it’s back in massive shoegaze territory with enormous reverb before the verses pull back into that rollicking energy again. The stylistic variation in just these first two tracks is striking. 22 functions as a gentle two minute interlude to breathe and reset before FIG TREE arrives as probably the EP’s most considered and intricately written moment. Wistful and tender, it takes its full three minutes to build from quiet to a soaring ending. The EP closes with ITS FINE which holds onto that same complicated emotional core that’s too nuanced to be called simply sad. A surprisingly affecting journey in just seventeen minutes.