Leeds-based producer BUFFEE trades lo-fi bravado for a more calculated chaos on EP2, a collection of songs sidestepping convention without fully severing their pop roots. A tenacious producer — she managed to record vocals for her debut EP Victory Lap through underwear-wrapped Apple earphones — who revels in wringing every last decibel from maxed-out compressors, BUFFEE has built a sonic identity on the charm of imperfection. But where last year’s Victory Lap felt like a scrawled manifesto, EP2 is the revision: tighter, sharper, and harder to ignore.
The 6-track collection undulates through various physical and psychological spaces—from jejune streets to strobe-laden clubs, bedroom confessionals to internal monologues. Opener “ANVIL” drops us straight into the BUFFEE-verse, all angelic choirs and cathedral organs before the bass rumbles in, shaking the foundations like a not-so-divine intervention. “It’s nice” later offers an inversely tender respite, a warmly saturated lament that feels like a Polaroid capturing a moment of serenity between chaos and calamity. It’s as close to a tender moment as EP2 allows, with overdriven warmth and tape-saturated vocals masking what might otherwise veer into saccharine territory.
Lead single “Pictures” then emerges as the project’s centerpiece. This glitch-pop excursion perfectly captures the disorienting experience of trying to dance in a club where phone cameras outnumber actual dancers. The track’s alternating time signatures create a deliberate unease, before finally locking into a satisfying 4/4 groove punctuated by camera shutters and digital detritus. Meanwhile, the lyrics unfold with a deadpan immediacy, their spoken delivery slicing through the song’s stuttering beats like a side-eye across a crowded dancefloor. “I don’t look good in pictures, I don’t have time for pictures you are taking lots of,” BUFFEE mutters, the words landing somewhere between irritation and resignation. It’s a modern mantra, capturing the quiet absurdity of a culture where nightclub rituals are filtered through the lens of an iPhone camera before they’re even lived. The follow-up, “Put away your phone and keep your elbows in,” feels almost weary, a plea for space and attention in a room where both have been devoured by glowing screens and flailing limbs.
There’s a critique buried in the humor, as “Pictures” turns its focus to another dancefloor offender: “Don’t come up to me trying to do business with me when I’m on the dancefloor.” It’s a consummate summation of the transactional creep protuberant in spaces once reserved for escapism, wherein briefcases and facile business pitches feel as unwelcome as flash photography. BUFFEE’s dancefloor here acts as a mimetic caught between liberation and the intrusive glare of performative modernity. The result is less a manifesto than a mirror, held up to a club culture where the elbows are chaotic, the phones are ever-present, and the sanctity of the dancefloor is slipping through our fingers.
The claustrophobia of “Pictures” finds its morose resolution in “Wotel,” where discordant bass frequencies provide the foundation for harmonically stacked vocals that drift through reverb-soaked spaces like narcotized apparitions. The hypnotic four-to-the-floor beat coupled with the unwavering low-frequency bassline motif creates a sense of artificial infinity as if the club night has stretched beyond its natural conclusion into some liminal space between Saturday night and Sunday morning, where the smoke machines never run empty and the exit signs always seem just out of reach.
But in the middle of the two tracks, Sylvia Plath’s spectre looms large over “Puregold baby!” as BUFFEE weaves “Lady Lazarus” into a digital fever dream of drowning Ophelias and blood-streaked ribbons. The track positions the listener within Plath’s “peanut-crunching crowd”—the detached audience gawking at her metaphorical “big strip tease.” At its heart, “Puregold baby!” feels autobiographical, with BUFFEE—herself in her early twenties—acknowledging the disillusionment of young adulthood. She reflects on hope lost since adolescence, echoing Plath’s biting declaration: “I am only thirty. And like the cat, I have nine times to die. This is Number Three.” The resignation to endure (“10 years more can’t be that bad”) plays out in weary, sardonic layers, as BUFFEE lays herself bare—both figuratively and through the track’s visceral sonic palette. Lines like “say you’ve always been a very, very good friend” echo the hollow reassurances offered by spectators complicit in her unraveling, a modern analog to the poem’s self-aware performance of despair.
EP2’s distinctive sound stems from BUFFEE’s unconventional production methodology. Rather than adhering to standard mixing practices, tracks are built from zero-level parameters with cascading compressors fighting for dominance—a technique that gives the collection its characteristic density. This is most pertinent in “Puregold Baby!”; the production mirrors the uncomfortable intimacy within the lyrics via metallic crashes rising and falling like collapsing scaffolds, fighting with BUFFEE’s maxed-out reverberated lead vocals amongst disquiet layers of vocal murmurations, an ostensible nod to Plath’s cycles of annihilation and resurrection.
By inhabiting the intersection of experimental production techniques and pop sensibility, BUFFEE has crafted a collection that serves as a document of artistic growth and a blueprint for future exploration. EP2 represents BUFFEE’s evolution from bedroom producer to soundscape architect, though one still devoted to the DIY ethos that birthed the project during lockdown’s forced introspection. Like the proverbial plates stacked precariously on a stick—BUFFEE’s own metaphor for pop songcraft—these tracks maintain their balance by carefully considering chaos and control, never quite toppling despite their perpetual threat of collapse.
