EP Review: The Sunday Sadness - ‘The Sunday Sadness’

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The eponymous debut EP from French quartet The Sunday Sadness feels like a slice of your melancholia in musical form, except somehow they make even melancholia sound good.

Have you ever wondered what it would sound like if someone managed to translate the sadness you felt into music? Well you don’t have to wonder anymore, as The Sunday Sadness confront the subject in their debut self-titled EP. Going head-on into one of the most intimate subjects, there’s a certain comfort to be found in the hazy, synth-laced music that somehow manages to make a desolate feeling sound not so dreary.

Speaking about the EP, lead vocalist Matthieu Kirby says, “‘The Sunday Sadness’ EP is a collection of seven sad songs that depict the fate of someone that lost it all. Ambition, love, relationships, and especially the will to connect with a modern society that failed us. It was really important for us to entirely self-produce this record.  We wrote, tracked and mixed everything on our own. We spent a huge amount of time demoing, trying a thousand different structures and arrangements on every track of this EP because we wanted to come up with a genre that we own. We finally managed to mix our synth-wave, alt-rock, hip-hop and emo influences into a style that we like to call dark-pop. We're really proud of this EP and we’ve already started working on numerous demos for a future record, so stay tuned.”

The enticing opening beats of ‘Lost In The Crowd’ draw you in, hypnotising you and trapping you in a kaleidoscopic world of electronics. An underlying sense of yearning rings out between the high vocals, painting a cinematic world that’s infiltrated by sadness. The drawn-out atmosphere of ‘Lost In The Crowd’ is contrasted with the rhythmic ‘Damn, I Hate It’, which feels like it could almost be a dance track with it’s strong bass backbone and infectious chorus. A strong ‘80s influence can be felt in the funky grooves as guitars flit on top of the charismatic bass. Meanwhile, the breathy vocals of ‘Someone’ evoke a strong sense of nostalgia, and the synthesizers breeze across whilst a steady beat plods the track forward. ‘High Beams’ almost acts as an instrumental interlude, and even though it lacks lyrics, it certainly doesn’t dip on the intense sadness that characterise the EP. A cohesion can be found within the EP in terms of the similarity in music and themes, but sometimes that’s how a body of music can work best. A strong effort for their debut EP, The Sunday Sadness gives the world a taste of what they are capable of.

Words by Athena Kam