A Very Special Episode

Following the release of the explosive new single "But I'm a . . . Starr", A Very Special Episode drop their self-titled EP, AVSE, on July 31st. The latest offering from the Brooklyn trio is a record that hits like a shove in a crowded room: distorted guitar and feedback pulled tight around pop hooks, the fuzz of shoegaze dragged through the grit of noise rock, alternately bruising and melodic, sometimes in the same thirty seconds. The EP was written in the lead-up to and aftermath of Our Wicked Lady's annual Winter Madness battle of the bands, a tournament the trio won, with the prize money going straight back into funding the recording and mixing. AVSE began life as early sketches for a third full-length before the songs themselves made the call: five tracks that hit harder together than they would spread thin across an album. From the raw, propulsive urgency of opener "But I'm a . . . Starr" — a track that wears the anxieties of keeping a DIY band alive on its sleeve without ever losing its momentum — to the eerie, cinematic hush of closer "Suspirium," the record is threaded together by the same restless, lived-in intensity throughout. But it's "Too Cool" that sits at its heart. Wiry, nervy and coiled with tension, "Too Cool" turns that same restless energy outward — away from musical anxiety and toward the social kind. It's a party track with darkness seeping through the floorboards; a groove you can move to and a feeling you can't quite shake. Bio by Charlotte Lewis.