colby!‘s creatively shoots down like lightning bolts to the brain. Colors pop and light up inside. That’s how she envisioned her debut EP, FINE!. With its vintage luminescence, the pop maestro saw her EP in an array of colors. “I saw everything in green and silver and hot pink, with a sort of vibrant, retro feel,” she shares in a press statement. That blueprint served her well, as the six-song project erupts into a fireworks display of Julia Michaels-esque songwriting branded with her unique kaleidoscopic imprint.
Underneath the sparkling paint, there’s a dark, slithering creature born from somewhere deep inside. As you’ll hear from the start with the titular cut, there’s a side-winding stickiness to the melody. Production is equally as shadowy – almost spirited, ’80s, and electric. That musical charm continues to slide right into the next – a heartbeat swallows you whole with “Out of Sight” as it throbs and tumbles downward. colby!’s voice remains windswept and enchanting as she sculpts her words and lets them fall from her lips. “I go to a dark place / When I see your face, I can’t erase,” she sings, breathlessly.
Songs like “To Each Their Own” leave bruises on the eardrums with an icy punch. That’s not to say her music is dangerous; it’s so stylized that you can never exit unscathed. “Monster,” a collab with Shaya Zamora, primes the listener for the windy, seductive magic of spooky season. It carries the twilight present earlier on the EP but pushes the boundaries until they burst into a skeletal, smoky frenzy.
“For the Record” pulses with light percussion and a strong, acoustic-wrought underpinning. She twirls the vocals like spinning tops around the silky melody, as though the emotions have nowhere to go. Same goes for the guitar-heavy closer, “You,” a quieter, almost Billie Eilish-leaning moment. colby!’s voice aches, layered with ghostly harmony that’s seemingly ripped from her body. But that’s the nature of her performance style across all six tracks – it’s as though she pulls threads from her heart and lets them tussle in the wind.
Don’t you dare let colby!’s FINE! EP float by without giving it the attention it deserves. It’s equal parts brittle and sinewy, fluorescent and hollow, brutally emotive and body-crushing. It’s the sort of project that positions her as one of today’s brightest upstarts.
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