Last Relapse – EP by Last Relapse: EP Review

by admin November 25, 2025

November 25, 2025

Last Relapse - EP by Last Relapse: EP Review

After a thirteen-year silence, Atlanta indie-rock band Last Relapse returns with Last Relapse – EP, a project built from unfinished songs that refused to die quietly. With their emotionally charged performances and dreamy guitar work through the late 2000s and early 2010s, the band stepped away while momentum was still rising. But as frontman David Holding admits, the music “never stopped haunting us.” In early 2025 they regrouped, dusted off the fragments, and finished the chapters left open.

The opener, “Everyone Dances Outside of Their Bodies,” sets the emotional temperature immediately. It begins with a suspended, shimmering guitar tone that feels like light bending underwater, before the drums tumble in with gentle restraint. Holding’s voice enters with tender angst, like remembering something he’s tried not to revisit. As the rhythm gradually tightens, the guitars glisten with a melancholic rush, and a faint harmony drifts behind him like a half-remembered dream. Lyrically it’s sharp and dislocated, as he sings, “The room was open, but it looked like / there was something pressing on all of you,” getting behind the dissociation with eerie clarity. By the final swell, cymbals crash and guitars billow into a cinematic haze like finally exhaling after years of holding it in.

Further in, “Rats in a Cage” stretches its atmosphere wide, as shimmering guitars ripple across a hard-thumping drum groove while Holding’s voice floats above everything, echoing into a vast emotional space. It is restless and urgent, like pacing the edges of a decision you’re not ready to make.

The closer, “Solfeggio Dream,” softens the palette, as warmer guitars chime reflectively, and Holding sings slowly and hauntingly, his voice suspended high but heavy with introspection.

Without dramatics or theatrics, Last Relapse – EP lands as a thoughtful, resonant comeback — the sound of a band finishing what they started and discovering, in the process, that the old ghosts still have something to say.