Some records seem to understand that distance is rarely measured in miles alone. It can sit inside a twin size bed, in the hush after a phone call, in a city that keeps moving while a private grief asks for more time.
Across four compact tracks, “A Handful Of Moons” carries that private math with unusual patience. It treats love as something touched by geography, memory, family names, and the strange courage required to keep tenderness intact after someone has already loosened their grip.
Nevler, the recording name of Meredith Nevler Derecho, arrives here as a New York City singer-songwriter and violinist with a story folded neatly into her chosen name. She uses her mother’s maiden name to honour a woman who also played violin, a detail that matters because the instrument does not behave like decoration on this EP.
It moves as a second voice. It draws breath around the lyrics, shades the corners of the arrangements, and gives the music an inherited pulse. “A Handful Of Moons“, is her first act as a producer, yet it already shows a clear sense of emotional architecture.
The project also has the warm fingerprints of collaboration. Chris Peters produced and mixed the EP, adding guitars, synths, and mandolin, while Kevin Garcia plays drums on several tracks.
The three knew each other in college, and that shared history gives the record a lived-in quality. Parts were recorded in Nevler’s apartment and parts in Peters’s apartment, with files traded back and forth until her violin layers, vocal harmonies, and melodic fragments found a shape.
The EP opens with “Sequoia“, a campfire love song whose central question, “Will you show me that you’ll slow your steps to stay right next to me?”, sets the emotional scale.
The arrangement has a gentle brightness associated with Ingrid Michaelson’s playful touch, while the violin lines stretch upward with a cinematic lift. The mandolin gives the romantic bridge a small golden flicker. It is lovely, yes, but not fragile in the obvious way. It feels like a promise being tested by open air.
Then comes the drop into “Unfair“, the defining turn of the EP. Its waltz motion makes the hurt feel formal, almost courtly, before the track breaks into a bridge of drums, guitars, radiator-made dragons, and thickening drama.
Florence and the Machine can be felt in the theatrical pressure, while the influence of Ethel Cain and Mitski gives the piece a sharper interior edge. Nevler’s part Asian identity, and her stated admiration for Mitski’s embrace of mixed identity, adds another line of resonance without asking the song to carry a slogan.
The ache is personal, but its questions about belonging and release reach further.
“Sunshine” is smaller, almost cramped by design, and that restraint is its strength. Recorded largely in Nevler’s New York City bedroom, it turns sparse instrumentation, doubled vocals, and ambient room noise into a study of aftershock.
Elliott Smith’s shadow is present in the rough closeness of the take, but Nevler keeps her own footing. The lyric about the twin size bed is devastating because it refuses to perform devastation. Sometimes a room becomes evidence. Sometimes a bed, an ordinary bed, becomes a courtroom with no judge.
By the time “Velvet” closes the EP, confusion and affection have learned to share the same chair. The track’s violin harmonics and distorted background vocals push it toward a faintly extra-terrestrial glow, while Nevler’s sweet, dramatically boosted vocal remains the human center.
The Sufjan Stevens and Little Mermaid comparison is odd enough to be useful: innocence, water, longing, and ornate ache all press against one another.
What gives “A Handful Of Moons” its authority is not grandeur. It is scale. The EP runs a little over thirteen minutes, yet it has the slow-turning focus of an Agnes Martin grid painting, where slight changes in tone begin to feel enormous if you give them attention.
Nevler’s California to New York story could have become a simple tale of departure, but the record is less interested in escape than in what remains attached after movement.
For a debut EP, “A Handful Of Moons” is unusually self-possessed. Nevler does not solve the long-distance situationship at its center.
She studies its weather, its habits, its tender tricks, and its little betrayals. The result is a chamber folk and indie pop release that feels handmade without feeling unfinished, intimate without becoming small.
If a handful of moons is all one can carry from one coast to another, what does it mean to keep singing after the light has changed?
