Gen‘s MIDNIGHT RAIN is meditative, enigmatic and moody, and very difficult to classify.
This EP comes less than four months after the release of her debut album DISCONNECT cemented her sound as a dark, acoustic pop sound with occasional UK Garage-style beats. It’s difficult to classify beyond that. It’s brooding and nocturnal. Many of these songs lack anything like a beat. There’s a tempo, and a time signature, but often the instrumentation is strings and keyboards, or an acoustic guitar. It’s too ambitious to be ambient, too weird to be pop.
MIDNIGHT RAIN takes this approach even further. Lead single “IT’S TOO LATE” (above) is the closest thing to a single on this EP. It’s very reminiscent of early Burial, and Gen’s vocal sounds surprisingly like samples and clips from other sources. Even then, there’s no real hook, and the sub 2:30 running time doesn’t let it settle in. In fact, only one of the five tracks touches the three-minute mark. It’s an effective tease: After hearing “IT’S TOO LATE” once, I’ve played the 11 minutes of this EP a half-dozen times.
It plays mostly like a collection of ideas to be expanded on and album-ized later, or to be a basis for a collaboration with another artist. More than once I thought of The Weeknd’s brilliant, mysterious and sinister debut House of Balloons. Here’s “BLADE”, that might have been a morning-after response to a night out with 2011 Abel Tesfaye:
It’s either that or she’s got her eyes on soundtracking the next Denis Villeneuve film. What lyrics there are concern failed connections with other people, self-doubt, loneliness and isolation.
The tracks on MIDNIGHT RAIN almost certainly emerged during the process of assembling the DISCONNECT record — even the release dates mingle on the Soundcloud page. DISCONNECT is denser and perhaps more song-oriented than MIDNIGHT RAIN, though thematically and lyrically aligned. There are several songs like “BROKEN MIND”, proper singles with a chorus and proper song arc:
Many of the songs on DISCONNECT are languid, atmospheric soundscapes that sometimes feel like pop ballads given an extreme “Slowed and Reverb” treatment.
DISCONNECT and MIDNIGHT RAIN are excellent complements to each other, so much so that a deluxe edition of the pair could integrate MIDNIGHT RAIN’s short textural pieces as interludes in DISCONNECT and result in something almost LP-length.
Gen’s Soundcloud has some great stuff that’s not available on streaming too – debut EP Hoodie from 2018 is poppier than her newer releases, and worth a listen if the stuff above appeals.
Further Reading
Mesmerised review
