MSPAINT have spent the past couple of years touring their 2023 debut album, Post-American, opening for Soul Glo, Twitching Tongues, and Spirit of the Beehive (to name a few). Today, the Hattiesburg four-piece are following that up with their No Separation EP, due out May 23 via Convulse Records.
Recorded and co-produced by Show Me The Body’s Julian Cashwan Pratt and Harlan Steed, plus the band’s own Nick Panella, the EP dips further into the guitarless, Y2K-sounding synth-punk that makes their music feverish and hard to define. MSPAINT expand that palette on their lead single, “Angel,” where haunted synths build into a freaked-out high. All the while, vocalist Deedee basks in a brighter, more optimistic headspace about being good enough (“I feel like the problem/I feel in the way/But I’m staying present/This is just today”).
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Of the song, Deedee says, “It’s definitely different from the way I would usually write for the band. It’s something you can sing along to, but it’s also something that maybe you’re saying to yourself that feels good — some positive thinking. I felt like we succeeded at bringing poppier elements into our space and making them our own instead of trying to bring what we do into a pop space.”
“Most of our music is genuinely inspired by our relationships to each other,” Panella adds. “We bring together disparate musical philosophies and try to marry them and create our own community that can accept those differences and actually thrive as a result of them. Originality ultimately isn’t about creating something new as much as it’s about navigating your own inner world and the inner worlds of those directly around you until you’ve learned something that hasn’t been learned before.”
See the video for “Angel,” plus the LP artwork and tracklist, below.
MSPAINT – No Separation tracklist
- “Drift”
- “Wildfire”
- “Surveillance”
- “No Separation”
- “Angel”