Bandcamp Most bands release an EP and then work out what comes next. Unité Douleur wrote all four of theirs in their first year as a band, before any of them existed in public, and have been putting them out one at a time since. Below Zero came in November 2025, Pollen Haze in March, and Sun Burns arrives on the 30th. One remains.
Read those titles in order and the frame is obvious. Below zero, pollen, sun. The seasons are the structure, and the band say the cycle stands for the ones that repeat in a life rather than in a year. What that means practically is that this EP is not a step forward from the last one. It is a position in a shape that was finished before we heard any of it.
It also means the darker, rawer sound the band describe here is not a development. It was always going to be the third one.
Four tracks, and they do not sit still. “Ash Dwellers” and “Wear the Scars” are the compact end: held tightly, brighter, closer to the alternative rock backbone the band keep rather than abandon. “Wear the Scars” is the loudest thing here and the one that reaches highest into the upper register, and it is also where the Deftones influence they name is easiest to hear.
Then the EP opens. “Sand Castles” carries nearly twice the distance between its quiet and loud passages that the opener does, and “Prayers” doubles it again. The closer has by far the widest dynamic range of the four, the darkest tonal picture and the most weight down low, and a deep spoken vocal sits at the centre of it rather than on top. After two songs that keep their shape, an ending that refuses to is the right decision.
That the band recorded this piecemeal at their guitarist’s home studio and had Jack Bowman mix and master it is worth knowing, because the seams do not show where you would expect them. What shows instead is the difference between the first half and the second, and that is architecture rather than accident.
Where it gives ground is in the opening pair. Two tracks at similar levels, similar brightness and similar restraint mean the EP takes until its midpoint to establish that it has a range at all. On a four track release that is a third of the running time spent holding back.
Claire Leloire’s cover is doing something quietly clever. An apple tree in ochre and gold over a dry field, heavy with fruit, and on the same branches, white blossom. Spring and late summer on one tree at once, with a clenched fist in the foreground. For a record that is the third season in a cycle written all at once, a tree wearing two seasons simultaneously is exactly right.
Two years old as a band, three quarters of the way through a plan they made at the start. The last one is the interesting question now.
The four tracks divide cleanly in half. “Ash Dwellers” and “Wear the Scars” are held tightly, with a fairly narrow gap between their softest and loudest moments, and “Wear the Scars” is both the loudest and the brightest thing here. From there the EP opens up steadily: “Sand Castles” carries close to twice that range and “Prayers” close to twice again, making the closer by a wide margin the most dynamic piece on the record. It is also the darkest and the one with most weight in the low end, which matches an arrangement built around a deep spoken vocal set into the mix rather than above it. Nothing here has been mastered flat, and the widening from front to back is consistent enough to read as a decision about running order.
Standout tracks: Prayers, Sand Castles
