The first time I heard how will i rest in peace if i’m buried by a highway?//, I found myself startled by a random memory. I was sixteen again, in a car that smelled faintly of gasoline and fast food wrappers, listening to Bloc Party’s “Banquet” crackle through plastic speakers too small for the sound they were expected to carry. The music then was charged with a particular kind of tension, a bodily knowledge that something was not right in the world, but also a need to move, to dance, to exhaust oneself trying to outpace it. KennyHoopla understands that feeling in its fullness. His EP does not reproduce it in simple homage, but rather seems to lift the scaffolding of those old sensations and rebuild them using sharper, more volatile materials. The result is unstable, bright, a little dangerous.
- how will i rest in peace if i’m buried by a highway?//
The track begins mid-breath, as if it had already been playing somewhere, just beyond earshot. A jagged guitar riff slices in, insistent and familiar in its cadence, evoking the wiry architecture of early post-punk revival. Yet what follows is not an echo of the past but a collapse of its stability. Kenny’s voice arrives unguarded, cracked at the edges, with the desperate line “I don’t wanna die in a hospital” delivered not as performance but as plea. The production feels precarious, as though the song might unravel at any moment, but the tension is the point. It is a structure built to sway, not stand still. What is most striking is not its energy, though it pulses with it, but its emotional immediacy—something closer to witnessing a panic attack than attending a concert.
2. plastic door//
A jittery, kinetic piece that balances between sincerity and irony, it seems held together by static electricity. The lyric fragments—”plastic door, static floor”—could be throwaway imagery in a lesser song, but here they accumulate a kind of subliminal logic, tied together by rhythm and repetition. Kenny repeats “I’m not okay” with a cadence that hovers between mantra and mockery. There is a humor here, but it is bitter and breathless. The drums mimic the sensation of racing thoughts, while the guitar tone gleams with a processed edge that makes it feel like a memory filtered through a glitching screen. The aesthetic is reminiscent of the era when emo flirted with pop, but the execution is both more anxious and more assured.
3. sore loser//
This is the most formally reminiscent of early 2000s indie rock, in its phrasing and its pacing, but it does not rest there. The guitars stutter like faulty machinery, evoking both physical movement and a sense of internal hesitation. Kenny’s performance is, again, the anchor. “I’m a sore loser, but at least I lose with style” is not a punchline but a gesture of self-portraiture. The song resists polish, and its collapse near the bridge into distortion and vocal fragments feels less like destruction than revelation. The instability is written into the DNA of the piece. Its best moments feel discovered rather than constructed, as though the artist found them by accident and chose not to clean them up.
4. the world is flat and this is the edge//
The EP ends not with resolution but with elevation. The song reaches upward, sonically and thematically, without pretending to arrive anywhere secure. The chorus swells toward something that might have been grandeur, but the imagery—”I saw God in a convenience store”—grounds it again in the banal and the strange. There is something fragile about the whole endeavor, a sense that the song might shatter if it climbed any higher. Yet it continues. That persistence feels earned. The arrangement is crowded but purposeful, voices and textures competing for attention like thoughts in a sleepless mind. It is less a closing statement than a moment suspended in air.
What this EP offers is not nostalgia, although it often brushes against the textures of remembered sound. Instead, it uses those materials to ask what remains useful about the music that once gave shape to adolescent fear, pleasure, and confusion. KennyHoopla writes in the language of emotional debris—fragments, echoes, unfinished thoughts—and arranges them into something like clarity. The past is not a refuge here. It is something to interrogate. The result is restless, unresolved, and worth returning to.
Man, I love this so much. 🙂