In defence of the humble EP
Picture walking home late at night, and a friend asks you for a music recommendation. They’re a new friend, with identifiable visual markers that suggest they have decent taste in art and culture, probably know why shoegaze is called shoegaze, and they can give three good reasons why Kid A is the best Radiohead album: what you’ll say next matters. So when, if ever, are you going to be recommending an EP?
It’s no convoluted claim to state that EPs often get lost in the shuffle, as music fans tend to prefer a complete album that delineates an entire creative process or vision, start to finish, rather than the odds and ends tacked into, for all intents and purposes, a separate Google Doc labelled ‘Other’. But the fact of the matter is, EPs are an essential launch point for new music.
EPs allow new, emerging artists a vehicle through which they can actually release something substantial, rather than a torrent of loose singles. For instance, Billie Eilish, who once brooded, as we all did, aimlessly in her childhood bedroom, staring at posters of Justin Bieber and dreaming of putting something into the world, with her debut EP, don’t smile at me, she did exactly that. The EP was an invitation to discover, and without it, we wouldn’t have ‘Birds of a Feather’.
The form of the EP especially allows women a way into a usually male-dominated industry, giving extra welly as we attempt to yank open the door which has otherwise been jammed shut. Another example is Bikini Kill‘s DIY, self-titled EP from 1992, which was an unflinching, raw portraiture of misogyny, abuse, and unfair criticism, pedalled through a form that embodies the way female punk in Olympia, Washington, was usually pushed to the side; a meta-textual dish of piping-hot punch pie, if you will.
At the very least, albums usually come with a vision board, one easily manipulated by the greasy hands of management, PRs, labels, marketing teams, and, newly, algorithmic decision-making. Albums quickly become inauthentic or dishonest because the lengthy process can zap the life out of a project through distance from the original idea. Hindsight isn’t always 20/20, and precisely because they are overlooked, EPs are the perfect place to find evidence of an artist’s true vision, long after the bitter We-Work coffee weakens and the interactive whiteboard loses power.
However, suggesting plainly that the EP form allows the artist an important first foray into the burgeoning bellows of their own sound is still a redundant way to see the form, still a way to push it back into the sweet, ‘humble’ box, when really, an EP can allow for a pivot that is unusually fast with the spontaneity of experimentation.
Take New York duo Sex Week, who released their self-titled album in 2024, but followed up not a year later with the seductive, gothic epic, Upper Mezzanine, carrying a smudgy, scribbly, shockingly unique vision, but it was also claustrophobic enough that a whole album would’ve been a step too far. Hence, the medium was the perfect vehicle for the content, like an ice cream on a waffle cone.
Plus, are we really going to dock points away from a smaller project just because it’s, well, smaller? Does art have to be perfect to be complete? By purchasing albums over EPs simply because there is more to chew on, we are denigrating the quality of music by favouring our penchant for gluttony. We are playing out the logic of consumerist capitalism, with no reward but greater pressure on artists to make more, say more, do more, for less.
At the other end of this tunnel, the unhappy consequence of this reality is that the amount of music uploaded to streaming platforms every day is growing almost exponentially. Music, something that has strong roots in community-building, oratorial archiving and the imitation of nature, is becoming increasingly inaccessible because of this. There is too much to listen to, to make sense of, to understand.
The EP, which can serve as a playground for musicians to dissect some of their work and build it anew, opens up new avenues into music-making, democratising a world that is slowly clamped into the hegemonic jaws of the tech-bro billionaires.
For instance, on Water From Your Eyes’ 2025 EP, It’s Beautiful, the band offer an album companion to It’s a Beautiful Place, pulling three album standouts apart and rebuilding them into sharper diagrams. Universe-bending and gravity-shifting, the EP offers a new way to consume the same things, and, if we want to get out of the mess we’re in, we’re going to need this logic now, more than ever.
