San Francisco-based band Hollow Minds have released a debut EP that they recorded and mixed themselves in a basement. And it sounds like it, too: intimate, raw and entirely its own. Kiss Me Goodnight is a love letter to 1990s college radio written from the present day, exploring urban anxiety, fragile relationships and the exhaustion of trying to find one’s place in a city that never stops demanding something from you.
The EP opens with the melancholic and tension-filled title track, reaching for something it can never quite articulate. From there, it moves through five distinct emotional states without losing the overarching thread. ‘Pour’ pushes the sound into more chaotic territory, while ‘Awake’ slows everything down to become the EP’s most vulnerable moment, drifting into a restrained slowcore mood that makes the rest of the record feel heavier by contrast. ‘Scene’ opens with guitars bursting with an almost anthemic energy, introducing the social dynamics of the alternative scene and the ways desire gets performed within it. ‘Wrong Bus Stop’ closes with the densest sound on the record: fuzz upon fuzz, painting the picture of someone who has given up trying to explain just how tired they are.
The EP’s musical style reveals some fairly recognisable influences: the melodic instincts of The Breeders, the distortion of Dinosaur Jr. filtered through a more accessible pop sensibility, the kind of 1990s alternative rock that contemporary bands like Momma have managed to revive without merely imitating the past. While the bass and drums provide a solid foundation, the emotional weight rests with the guitars, which use open chords, generous reverb and bursts of distortion that appear and disappear like moods. A big part of the EP’s appeal also lies in the vocals, which sit comfortably within the mix rather than above it, giving the songs a sense of intimacy that suits the material perfectly.
Kiss Me Goodnight doesn’t reinvent alt-rock, nor does it set out to be a revivalist act. Instead, it sounds like a young band using the sonic and emotional language of the nineties to speak honestly about the present, with more confidence and self-awareness than most DIY debuts manage. Their distinctive voice is still taking shape, but the vulnerability with which that process is captured is precisely what makes this EP so compelling.
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