There is something deliciously conspiratorial about Hidden Shores and the release of the “Neon Silence” EP. I find myself picturing the artist wiping chalk dust off their hands after a day of teaching elementary schoolers, only to go home, dim the lights, and converse with algorithms. It’s not your typical moonlighting gig; while most are decompressing with reality TV, Hidden Shores is out there teaching feelings to a hard drive, trying to find where the pulse of a machine syncs up with a beating heart.
The result is fascinatingly contradictory. The opener, “No-one Lives Forever”, hits you with a velvet hammer. The track floats on these bright, reverberating plucked strings that slide around in a way that feels almost liquid, distinctly dreamlike. It asks heavy questions about things fading away the impermanence of us but does so with such a relaxed, psych-soul groove that you almost accept your own mortality with a shrug and a nod.
Then the mood shifts with “Rows Of Houses”. Here, physics gets surprisingly romantic. It’s driven by this hypnotic, repetitive pluck that loops like an obsession, building into a trance-like chant. It captures that specific, suffocating anxiety of being bound to someone by forces you can’t see, balancing scientific inevitability with the messiness of human attachment. If Schrödinger’s cat needed a soundtrack for its existential confusion, this would be the B-side.
I was stopped cold by “Where The Light Still Reaches”. It starts deceptively simple acoustic strings and a raspy voice but when that orchestral-like swell kicks in, it feels like the air getting sucked out of the room. It tackles the ache of separation with a sonic weight that pushes against your chest, loud and anthemic, before collapsing back into a quiet resolution.
Closing with “Stay Right Here”, the EP retreats into the solitude of 3 AM anxiety. The shift between the intimate lower register and that delicate falsetto mirrors the internal fight between panic and the desperate need to just be still.
Hidden Shores isn’t letting AI write the song; they are using it to amplify the ghost in the machine. It makes you wonder: if the code provides the texture, but the heartbreak is real, does the computer eventually learn how to cry?
