A running theory: The youth yearn for breakbeats. The frenetic electronics of Nineties dance music have rumbled beneath the surface of indie rock and pop for some time now. The current wave of new acts — think Fcukers, Underscores, and of course, PinkPantheress — wields the sound with an uncanny magnetism, as if communicating from a post-digital future. Ear, the London and New York-based duo comprised of Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan, who met while students at Bard, have become the type of buzzing indie band you used to hear about in the mid-2000s, fitting as the renaissance of aughts-era sounds points to a more spiritual than aesthetic concern.
Following the release of their debut single, “Nerve,” in 2024, the pair have built a thunderous appreciation via the analog format of college parties and raves throughout the country. Then, last year’s The Most Dear and The Future, a slender collection of tracks that straddled a line between pop, ambient, folk, and dance with an air of rustic mysticism that seemed to travel through music circles like gossip bursting from localized containment. The pair’s hushed harmonization, like on the featherlight “Theorem,” makes for a soft landing pad for the maelstrom of synths and drums that puncture the songs’ quieter moments.
The group’s latest album, Rumspringa, released last week via A24 Music, takes an even more gentle touch, building crests of softly crooned lo-fi melodics that bloom into controlled synth chaos. Opening tracks “Coil” and “Rumspringa” lean into found audio recordings, creating an ambient motif of alienation, floating in a sea of sonic ephemera — movie clips, instructional tapes, brooding household sounds — and conjuring a liminal sense of emotions frozen in time.
Ear gives us the satisfaction of a proper drop midway through the album, on “Ne Plus Ultra,” synths stab through lilting vocals like waves crashing, rising in intensity with each beat. The album gets its title from the Amish tradition of allowing children, once they come of age, to spend time outside the community before deciding whether to return. Rumspringa, fittingly, is an album preoccupied with thresholds. Lyrically, the songs find the pair confronting the unknowability of adulthood all while careening between the intimacy of folk’s acoustics and the catharsis of electronic music.
Ear is among the more exciting groups to arise from their generational cohort, at once contending with the isolation of a Covid-tinged adolescence and a world upended by technology. Those early singles that caught listeners’ attention were recorded on an iPhone, which makes it fitting that the group can sound like an update on the instincts of a band like the Postal Service, which made turn-of-the-millennium alienation feel intimate, handmade, and newly digital.
Ear’s gift comes from patience. Even at its most dancefloor-ready, Rumspringa is interested in lingering in the ambiguity, resulting in a collection of songs that feel homespun and futuristic, finding something like transcendence in the space between a bedroom and a rave. At times, that restraint can make the record feel more textural and ambient, lingering to the point of near suffocation. Still, when the synths finally surge, the payoff is real.
.jpg "SML’s Jeremiah Chiu Readies New Album Edge Conditions")
