Bleach Lab - Close To The Flame EP

The EP’s opener, ‘Drown’, sets the tone: woozy guitar textures and soft percussion wrap around Jenna Kyle’s vocals, which hover somewhere between confessional and celestial. There’s a richness here, a fullness that feels simultaneously fragile and determined. Lead single ‘Feel Something’ continues this balancing act, pulsing with melancholy as Kyle sings of a relationship on life support, caught between dependency and decay.

But it’s the title track, ‘Close To The Flame’, that glows brightest; an all-consuming swirl of guitars and vocals that feels like the soundtrack to the final scene of a coming-of-age film: driving into the night, nowhere to go but away from everything you know. Kyle has described it as wanting to "merge into one" with someone you love so deeply, you risk losing yourself; it’s vulnerable, raw, and beautiful in its chaos.

Elsewhere, ‘In Your Arms’ offers a tender reprieve, while ‘If I Could Be Anything’ closes the collection with a yearning that's both hopeful and resigned. Throughout, there’s an undercurrent of tension: the push and pull between wanting to be close to someone and fearing the fallout.

Bleach Lab’s first project since the addition of guitarist Louis Takooree, it finds them more confident and cohesive than ever. Producing themselves, they’ve honed their sound into something both immediate and expansive, wrapping difficult feelings in sonic warmth. Like its title suggests, this EP is about getting too close, getting burned, but doing it anyway.