Since emerging in 2021, U.K.-based experimental artist feeo has released three prismatic EPs showcasing her talent for using music as an exploratory vessel to probe the big questions of life. Tinged by R&B/soul, her debut feels like we’re getting older doesn’t it reckons with mortality and aging. Last year’s Ah, hunger! brooded over the pangs of longing and scarcity under storm clouds of ambient alt-rock. Now, on feeo’s third EP run over—a sequel to the latter—she contends with the arrival of a long-awaited fulfillment, prodding earnestly at the bliss and consequences of overabundance. Gushing with visceral honesty, its songs manifest an alluring sonic palette that submerges feeo into dually grandiose and sparse soundscapes.
You first enter the vacillating worlds of run over through its opening track “for hunger was a beast,” where a pensive swell of glacial tones and textures crashes with paced certainty like a tidal wave upon the shore. Under the daunting weight of its sublime melody—rising from subterranean nothingness to droning ambiance—feeo’s dimly glowing vocals suffuse the oceanic currents of emotion and sound that ebb within. “When I was young / like so many others / I didn’t know suffering / but how I knew hunger,” she sings with languid warmth. Taking the form of a beast this monstrous appetite chases her with relentless abandon, the impact of the song’s pulsating beats echoing its impending footfalls.
That daunting presence briefly subsides to give way to the collection’s first tangle with overwhelming emotional and physical gratification. “it was then that i” tempers the deafening melancholia that begins run over with a beatific vision of love. Interspersed by the buzzing distortions of two breathy coos—one high pitch, the other a low bellow—feeo navigates the divine landscape of her lover’s body to discover a realm replete with soulful ecstasy. “All becomes clear / In my mind,” she elucidates. “Every time / Our bodies Collide.” As the song starts to dissipate, a final whisper is dispelled: “I taste God on your lips / On the blades on your hips.”
As you enter its second half, the project makes a sudden shift to accommodate more than just personal romance, with feeo confronting the ramifications of both politically and economically driven excess as well. In doing so, she bridges the gulf that lies between one’s individual experiences and the world around them: where destructively bombastic forces like greed fueled colonialism fuel the degradation of land for resources. Illustrated via “tnteen”—samples of gunshots, hefty drums, and groaning riffs punctuating its strident melodics—the track finds feeo illuminating the exploitative demolition of mining. “Dynamite underneath our feet / treasure in the wasteland,” her haunting words caution. “When they promised us change / we hid beneath the sheets.” Hinging her despair upon the potent image of a finger on a detonator, the song urges recourse with dire prescience.
Like a slowly retracted microscope, feeo refocuses the EP’s lens at the macrocosmic level on the breathtaking ballad “the world weeps, her cancer conceived in sweet england,” observing with dismal resignation her home country’s contribution to overindulgence. “heavy as a birthright” (a Bandcamp exclusive) brings the collection to a close with a flurry of ghostly vocals and otherworldly glimmers, resuming the spacious balladry that began the album, except this time contorting it into a frigid electro-scape. Over this spacey flicker drifts spoken word revelations that unearth the terrible inherited traumas ingrained in her very bones. When the dissonance reaches its peak, she voices the undue burden that weighs on her shoulders.
As the tide recedes and the cacophony subsides, Run Over reveals the cyclical necessity of its songs in its completion. Ending submerged in the bleak but cathartic waves of its last few tracks, you return to its start ready to be enveloped once more, discovering something comforting in feeo’s raw contemplation of excess in all its forms. Be it the overly-satisfied needs of the heart or a sobering acknowledgment of humanity’s inherent hubris—the EP is another reminder of her talent for translating unwieldy emotions into poignant revelations.
