• News

• All

Nov 29, 2024 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Micah E. Wood

Baltimore-based musician and producer Jenna Balderson makes music under the moniker Eyas, first debuting with a handful of singles, including features on tracks from JPEGMAFIA and notcharles. Her solo music touches on shades of folk, bedroom pop, jazz, and electronica, conjuring a mercurial style that moves freely between whisper-quiet confessionals, glitchy lo-fi grooves, breathless art rock jams, and even pulsing dance rhythms. After teasing the record with a series of new singles this year, she is back with her debut EP, Quiet-loud, produced by Bartees Strange.

Quiet-loud acts as a restless showcase of Eyas’ songwriting, incorporating more stylistic and aesthetic shifts in a handful of songs than many artists do in whole albums. “Phaded” opens the record with airy vocals, finger-picked guitar, and glitchy electronic accents, before quickly transforming midway with a rush of wiry, energetic drums. “OP1” incorporates similarly nervy and restless rhythms, but this time layers them amidst understated lo-fi bedroom pop production and delightfully disheveled guitar work.

In contrast, “Undercurrents” is more jazzy and layered, incorporating dissonant chords and free-floating rhythms alongside drums from Eric Slick of Dr. Dog. As she explains, “‘Undercurrents’ is about dealing with depression and not wanting to disappoint your friends and partners. The chord structure oscillates between a dissonant F dim maj 7 and F maj 7, making it feel kind of ‘off’ and ‘on’ like how it feels to perform normalcy for people.”

The following two tracks lean further into Eyas’ electronic side, with “Admitting I’m Not Well” offering a nocturnal lo-fi confessional and “casa7” bringing her songwriting out of the bedroom and onto the dancefloor. The latter track is the record’s most captivating aesthetic left turn, encasing Eyas’ vocals beneath pounding UK garage beats and a buzzing synthy interlude.

Finally, “Something In Between” ends the EP in grand style, building atop pastoral acoustic guitar work and warm keys. The track blooms into a beautiful menagerie of chamber pop delights, coloring Eyas with golden-hued horns, woodwinds, and intensely intimate production. Despite the colorful finale, Eyas says the track “is about existing in a relational gray area, a liminal space resulting from a very palpable emotional connection with someone without the security of commitment – a ‘situationship’ so to speak.”

Check out the full EP below, out everywhere now.