Some music resists easy description, and that is not a weakness. Love & Nature, the debut album from Elpoep — the duo of Sylvan Heally and Theodore Smith — is precisely that kind of record. Eight tracks that move between folk, ambient and electronic territory with a naturalness that makes the genre question feel beside the point. The music is what it is, and what it is is quietly absorbing.
Love & Nature doesn’t announce itself. It opens with Another Day, which sets the mood without hurrying it, and moves through Feed Your Love, You Bring Light and Dream Standing with the patient, unhurried confidence of a record that knows exactly what it wants to be. Dimahiedron, the penultimate track, takes things somewhere more abstract before Happy Memories brings it to a close.
Elpoep is the kind of project that rewards repeated listening — the kind where details you didn’t notice the first time quietly reveal themselves on the third or fourth. There is a warmth running through the whole record that is hard to manufacture and harder still to sustain across eight tracks. Heally and Smith manage it.
Love & Nature is out now on Dancing Turtle Records, available through the online shop and on streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music.
