myra keyes - sweetsick [ep]
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Myra Keyes has a good thing going at Jackpot! Studios, the legendary Portland, OR space where Elliott Smith, R.E.M., Pavement, Jenny Lewis, and Built to Spill have recorded. It’s her third project there in four years and her first criss-crossing back and forth between Chicago, where she goes to college, and the Pacific Northwest to work again with engineer Kendra Lynn and mixer Zach Bloomstein. 2022’s bass-centric and brooding Girl Reimagined EP was followed by 2024’s supercharged full-length Flower in the Brick, which found Keyes enlisting the formidable talents of Portugal. The Man drummer Joe Mengis to power up her collection of polished, jagged pop-rock originals, an album that Imperfect Fifth called “a criminally overlooked release in modern indie rock…by a modern-day Renaissance woman.” The 19-year-old singer-songwriter handled all the other duties – bass, guitars, keyboards, vocals – and that winning formula is on display once more on her new Sweetsick EP, a three-song offering of hard candy confection and her second of two releases in the span of ten months. She’s on a roll. Mengis’s tasteful percussion and savvy rhythms pick up right where Brick left off, and it’s the chemistry between the two artists and a familiarity with Lynn and Bloomstein in the studio that keep things interesting at every turn, drawing in Keyes’s colorful soundscapes and biting interpersonal ruminations from the Windy City to fit comfortably over her drummer’s sophisticated chops.
Opener “Sweetsick” jumps to life like a marionette with a funky bit of stick-work before the bass and guitars join Mengis’s supple groove to kick the chorus into overdrive. It’s pop with a sweet tooth, for sure, but her tooth is a sharpened fang and there’s a knack for the killer line: “I can’t help but fantasize…it’s an illness, an illness…quick, get out…” the young lady warns. And later, sounding like No Doubt-era Gwen Stefani, Keyes coos menacingly: “It’s my way, boy, I know I’m the one, I’ll put your total world to shame…” The song sets its hooks from the first beat and never lets up. Talk about a sugar rush.
It’s the EP’s woozy, motley centerpiece, “Apartment Gargoyle,” a nearly seven-minute-long song-suite, that most reveals the conceptual leap from Keyes’s last record and her willingness to experiment with form and tempo – signs that the young songwriter is still expanding an already vibrant palette not only cosmetically but structurally. “I could get myself so lost, and just then I’d be found” is a lyric that encapsulates the vibe of the EP in every way as she haunts the fire escapes and alleyways of her adopted city, casting a few stones at broken windows and hitting the mark every time. Her confidence is undeniable, and a fear of the unknown is hardly enough to shake it. Keyes’s breathy, sumptuous vocals are front-and-center all over Sweetsick and nowhere are they more urgent than on the kaleidoscopic “Gargoyle,” a song in which all the elements that made Brick such a delight come together in one big heady rush. Elusiveness is a theme and there are hints of a newfound independence both playful – in a dialogue with an architecturally decorative stone monster – and serious when she doubles down on the exchange “in a juvenile, existential, vital way” that shows you she means it.
And yet closer “Countryside” might be the sleeper of the set with its drowsy chorus switch to 7/4 time and captivating bridge-and-vocal that is thirty seconds of pure heartbreak – here again it’s the acoustic guitar punctuated by Mengis’s exquisite drum track that elevates the song and puts a bow on another elegant EP from an artist who is finding her wings two thousand miles away from home, shedding old skins, and embracing transformation while working with a creative team that remains ever more familiar and intuitive, even when breaking new ground.
Sweetsick is the sound of looking forward, not backward, into the shapeless “brick and wind” of city streets for signs of affirmation, then trusting every instinct that got you there.