This new EP came together without a clear plan. I didn’t set out with a concept in mind, just a feeling, something unresolved that stayed with me long enough to form words, sounds, and eventually songs.
There are four tracks here. Each one feels like a different room in the same building. They’re connected, but not identical. You move through one and arrive in another, not necessarily in a straight line.
The title track, Nobody Forced Me to Love, is probably the most stripped down I’ve written in a while (?). It’s built on fragments, a list of emotional inversions: pain as foundation, memory as confinement, silence as violence, depression as familiarity. The phrases are blunt, but they came out that way for a reason. Some things don’t need to be expanded, they just need to be spoken.
In My Mortuary might sound like a love song if you don’t listen too closely. But it’s more about absence than connection. The body is gone, the presence is gone, but something still lingers. The mortuary isn’t literal, it’s a place in the mind where the dead parts of love are kept.
You Can’t Outrun What’s in Your Veins is about inheritance, not in the family sense, but in the way you inherit your own damage. The things you’ve done, the things done to you. You can reframe them, drown them, forget them, but they stay in the bloodstream. That song is probably the most personal in tone, even if it sounds the darkest.
The final track, This is the Silence, might be the most polished sonically. I didn’t do that intentionally, but it came out with more clarity than the rest. It closes the EP not with resolution, but with stillness. A kind of exhausted acceptance. I didn’t write it to uplift, only to close the door gently.
I don’t know if these songs fit cleanly into coldwave, post-punk, or synthpop anymore. I still work with machines. My personal machines. I still love the sound of minimal electronics. But more than anything, I’m just writing the things that don’t leave me alone.
Thanks for listening.
—George