There’s a sense, listening to “END / START,” that PELOWSKA is less interested in songs as discrete objects than in music as a site of reckoning. The Edinburgh-based duo’s debut EP unfolds like a private ritual made public, not cathartic in a neat, redemptive sense, but uneasy, tidal, and insistently human.
Trip-hop is the obvious reference point, but PELOWSKA treats the genre less as revivalism and more as emotional architecture. Echoes of Massive Attack’s submerged dread and Portishead’s fragile intensity surface, but they’re reconfigured through a contemporary lens that favours abrasion over polish.
Synths feel weathered rather than glossy; beats crawl and pulse like nervous systems recalibrating. Dave Tynan’s bass and guitar work anchors the music in the body, heavy and grounding, resisting any drift into the purely spectral.
At the centre is Aneshka Pelowska’s voice; not performative, not ornamental, but confrontational in its vulnerability. Her lyrics chart experiences of abuse, displacement, and mental illness with an unflinching directness that refuses metaphor as camouflage. Yet “END / START” isn’t an exercise in trauma-as-spectacle. Instead, it documents what comes after collapse: the slow, painful stripping away of inherited identities and the tentative forging of something new.
Nature imagery recurs throughout the EP, but not as pastoral escape. Oceans, fire, earth, these elements arrive as forces of destruction and renewal, mirroring the internal upheaval at the record’s core. There’s something almost animistic about the way Pelowska frames survival, as if resilience itself is drawn from the land rather than the self. Empowerment here is not glossy or triumphant; it is feral, hard-won, and imperfect.
Crucially, the EP’s rawness feels intentional rather than underdeveloped. PELOWSKA actively reject sonic perfection in favor of emotional truth, allowing rough edges to remain exposed. This choice lends the record its power, “END / START” doesn’t soothe, it sits with discomfort, offering connection rather than closure.
That the duo have already found support from tastemakers across the UK and beyond speaks to the EP’s resonance, but its real strength lies elsewhere. “END / START” feels like music made not for algorithms or scenes, but for listeners navigating their own thresholds, moments where something must end before anything else can begin. In documenting that fragile, volatile space, PELOWSKA announce themselves not just as a band to watch, but as artists willing to dwell where others turn away.
