Ah yes, the well known 7 stages of cardinal grief sins: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, lust, pride, acceptance, and… sloth? Wait that can’t be right.

Colliding With Mars (not to be confused with Jared Leto’s 0.008333 Hours to Mars) is an artist who’s always played a key role in sculpting the sound of what I wanted AuraLink to cover, not only having a place in the initial “vibe setting” playlist but acting as the soundtrack to the many nights spent building and then rebuilding the entire site. Needless to say, I have been eagerly awaiting a release to give me the opportunity to finally write about him.  Continuing his streak of pulling out top notch collaborations, lust + pride + sloth with Elijah Who is exactly that excuse I’ve been waiting for.

Part of what I love about Colliding With Mars is that he’s really an artist who’s in it for the art. Most artists drop everything as singles for the sake of maximum growth per song, but for the second time in less than a year we’ve been blessed with a 3 track combo pack for seemingly no reason other than that being what felt right artistically (granted the first one was a 7 minute brakence collab cut up into 3, but I digress). It starts off strong too, with the first track lust leading with a contrasting combo of playful blips and bloops and a bass synth that punches directly into your soul. It’s an instrumental that in spite of the vocal content proclaiming very bluntly the want to “fuck you in the back of the car” is quite playful and fun on the ears, balancing the near daintiness of the lead melody and the raw intensity of it’s clickly trap drums and distorted bass lines. Vocally the song brings exactly what I expect from CWM, that being this tone that sits somewhere between punk outrage and pop cleanness. It’s a style that feels exceptionally real, as it’s not overly processed and polished to perfection, feeling far more like a real and live plea directly to the listener. While not being for everyone, theres a realness to it that draws me in every single time, always guiding me through a new experience track by track.

While I could breakdown all 3 tracks, I’d actually rather talk about the project in it’s entirety. I think any CWM project is worth a front to back listening experience for the way they are methodically paced and the vibes are catered so specifically, so for that reason I implore you to listen to the whole EP front to back blindly without me prefacing the rest of it. What I will say, is I love how each song on this project is distinct from each other with incredibly different pacing, energy, and feel, yet still feeling immensely cohesive in it’s production. Elijah brings so much to this projects general sound and it’s hard to understate how many small details there are in these songs to sculpt and guide your listening experience into one that transports you through 3 distinctive feelings. The real icing on the cake is how each track transitions nicely into the next, a small thing that always gets points from me on an album.

Summing it up, lust + pride + sloth is a quintessential sampler of all that the scene has to offer, from it’s fast hyperpop adjacent synth work in pride, to the much slower and liquid vibes of sloth. As soon as I saw it on my release radar I knew it’d be an article, and then I proceeded to stress about my ability to get it written and out through a hellscape of a schedule this week. As a result, I’m late to the party, but personally I’d rather be fashionably late to tell you about something amazing than let it slip by. So enjoy the show, and keep an eye out for whatever Colliding With Mars has coming. If his last 2 projects are anything to gauge by, it’s gonna be a real show.