Tomato Soupโs new single โHalf Evilโ arrives as their most ambitious and introspective release yet, pushing their Motor-Folk identity into mythic and deeply intimate territory. The Denver six-piece, consisting of Alec Doniger, Adam Cabrera, Ronan Dowling, Riley Merino, Colin Sheehan, and Megan Ellsworth, has already built a reputation for spirited live shows and heartfelt songwriting. Here, they channel that same sincerity into something denser, stranger, and more searching, with a meditation on identity, inheritance, and the disorienting experience of being a person in the modern world.
The track opens quietly, with soft, soothing acoustic strums, and voices join in a gentle, confessional harmony. The tone is warm but tentative, like someone stepping into a memory they arenโt sure they want to revisit. When the hand percussion enters pulsing, rattling, and slowly swelling, it feels like a heartbeat emerging from deep underground, a subtle signal that the song is moving toward something larger.
Lyrically, โHalf Evilโ reaches far beyond the typical indie folk emotional palette. Opening with Hercules, the half-god, half-human hero, the song comes as a mythic inquiry into split origins. These references are scaffolding for the songโs psychological core. As the lyrics shift into Jungian language, cryptomnesia, archetype dual-mother, Holy Saturday, the track leans into existential uncertainty, articulating the unsettling feeling of living between inherited stories and private confusion.
The refrain, sung with a fragile steadiness, loops like a mantra, โHalf evil.โ It comes to admit to the imperfection, the complexity, and the fear of never quite being whole. As the song nears its end, the percussion builds, the strings subtly brush, making room forr the lyrics to collapse into present-day conversational fragments, with Donald Trump, media noise, childhood pain, the shift feels intentional: myth collapses into reality, archetype into memory. The final lines land like a slow exhale.
Tomato Soup is making connections across allusions, with confusion of the people across time and history, and of the haunting, universal desire to find home in oneself.
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Review by: Naomi Joan