By Phillipe Roberts
If you’re not a member of the COVID truther brigade tainting the air with hoax logic, space–physical, mental, and emotional–has been incredibly hard to find during lockdown. You’ve picked up at least trace amounts of social anxiety that no amount of brain-picking nasal swabs can totally soothe, and the first thing you’ll notice about anyone on the street is the presence or absence of a mask. Distance is safety. Hurry back to the nervous bubble and scrub off the outside.
Enter the microverse of y?, the debut EP from UK singer/producer Julia-Sophie and your personal escape hatch into endless open space. Clocking in at a bite-sized fourteen minutes, y? dives deep in search of emotional truths, unraveling and savoring each feeling with spellbinding patience. Soothing without neglecting the complex, violent honesty that comes with setting yourself free, these tunes breathe life into solitude. Stuck inside or masking up, this is a moment to let your guard down.
Though it’s destined to find its way into the vast chillscape that dominates the playlist world, y? glides to the head of the pack in its surgical use of textured sound to support its blistering lyrical excavations. Opener “breathe” expands and contracts like a lung, flowing from tender verses that cling tightly to a distorted drum rattle before erupting into a cavernous–“with your heart in my hands/I feel safe.” Bits of Julia-Sophie’s voice get lost in space. A sliver of desire–“kiss me”–slips into a brief moment of stillness. “x0x” punches the hardest of any track here. Heartbreaking self-doubt blooms from a flurry of beats that evolve continuously over the track, pressing you forward as the words “nobody wants me here” swirl overhead and a garbled French transmission overwhelms the senses. It’s a panic attack in real time, and you’re strapped in.
After the glittering respite of the interlude “i told you everything”, Julia-Sophie unveils “i left you”, the slow-burning pop gem that should become her calling card. “I try to buy time to be okay tomorrow/ to look inside my mind” hits unreasonably hard, pressed to the front of the mix and decorated only by the nervous ticking of synthesizer blips. Blurry passion is discarded with the ruthless admission “I don’t feel alive enough to call you.” Rather than present a mere snapshot of uncertainty, a portrait of loneliness or disillusionment, “i left you” drags you through all the hope, expectation, and self-annoyance that comes with stunted desire. Without a clear cut victory or loss, it makes up its own mind. Julia-Sophie’s emergence from her day job on the frontlines of synthpop trio Candy Says feels perfectly timed to create more than a space for therapeutic dreaming; y?’s soft curiosity is a gentle reminder to go beyond the pain of self-discovery and explore your own hidden worlds. What emotional spaces are you neglecting? What barriers are you building against the gathering storm of your own feelings? What better time than now to listen deeply?