Exit Kid, the grungier offshoot of Years & Years, are back with new EP, 'Garden', a five-track effort offering up grimy pop layered over thundering guitars.

Three years since frontman Emre Türkman joined forces with Dylan Bell, the drummer then on tour with Years & Years, the duo's second EP sees them cast off the dreamier shades of their debut, focusing in instead on the growling bass tones and heavier aspects of their noisy rock inspired outputs. 

Opening with 'Bleary Eyed', a shout of frustration at the ennui and Government ineptitude that 2020 has brought, the transition to 'Hell in a Handcart' sees this rage briefly reined in. We are carried along by the bouncing bass as the sound crescendos back into a fury of storming guitar. 'Dear Rose' is a brooding, darker cut, carrying a certain unease in the drawling vocals that echo out to us. 

It is followed by 'Working Stiff', a song about the slog of a long tour, and the distance this can create from people back home. It is a tune that plunges them straight back into their paranoia infused, 90s inspired grunge, guitars exploding forth from softer, almost sinister vocals. Concluding with titular track 'The Garden', the softer sound attempts to find some sort of resolution to the frustration and anxiety threaded throughout the rest of the EP – a resolution that isn't quite there, a certain disquiet lurking in the way that the tinkling piano abruptly cuts out at the end of the record. 

It's an EP that works out its frustration in feverish pop turns and frenetic guitar solos, one to echo the growing itch that our dormancy can't keep going much longer.

(readdork.com)