In 2023 MSPAINT emerged fully formed from the Hattiesburg underground with the release of their debut album, Post-American, and quickly drew acclaim from listeners and critics (Pitchfork, Stereogum, The FADER, BrooklynVegan, and many more) alike. A whirlwind of touring soon followed, and MSPAINT found themselves playing in front of a surprisingly wide range of audiences. “A lot of those tours were with wildly different bands,” explains Riley. “There’d be shows with really heavy bands like Twitching Tongues or Soul Glo, and then way over on the other side bands like Turnover or Beach Fossils. A lot of times we’d be surprised at how much all these different audiences embraced us.” The constant touring made an impact on the band’s new material as well. “We’d play a lot of these new songs live and I think that helped sort of contextualize what other people hear,” says Deedee. “We’re always trying to refine what we do. We see it as our normal thing, but playing live helps you to understand what other people are absorbing as poppy or heavy or whatever.”
No Separation pushes both of these poles even further, providing some of MSPAINT’s most thunderous and biting moments to date, but also some of the most catchy and downright beautiful parts they’ve ever written. The EP’s five dynamic tracks are the result of tireless writing, re-writing, editing, and tweaking, often with Panella locked in at the helm. “Nick really lived in the DAW this time, he became a soldier of the DAW,” laughs Deedee describing Panella’s dedication to demoing new songs on the computer. The group would then bounce between the digital realm and their real life practice sessions, hammering away at the tracks for hundreds of hours and fully tapping into the collective creativity that’s so key to MSPAINT’s singularity. “Most of our music is genuinely inspired by our relationships to each other,” Panella says. “We bring together disparate musical philosophies and try to marry them and create our own community that can accept those differences and actually thrive as a result of them. Originality ultimately isn’t about creating something new as much as it’s about navigating your own inner world and the inner world’s of those directly around you until you’ve learned something that hasn’t been learned before.”
With the songs nearly hardened into diamonds, the band then recruited Show Me The Body’s Julian Cashwan Pratt and Harlan Steel to record, produce, and help shepherd No Separation into its final form. “We met up with Show Me The Body in LA while we were on tour, and we went to visit this spooky studio where they were doing a ‘writing camp,’” explains Riley. “We didn’t even know what that was–ain’t nobody in Hattiesburg doing a writing camp. But it ended up being this really strange and cool experience, and we showed Julian and Harlan some of what we were working on. Julian hit the ground running and started offering feedback right away, so when it came time to work on the EP we remembered that and thought it was something worth exploring more.”
The results are immediate and hard-hitting on EP opener “Drift.” Riley’s signature distorted bass roars to life overtop of the unshakeable groove in Mackey’s drumming, and the song’s slow burning structure ignites into white hot musical bedlam as Deedee laments the country’s worsening wealth disparity and its consequences. “When you do a lot of traveling you start seeing things that you don’t see everywhere else,” they explain. “We saw a lot of houseless people, we’d go to some cities and just the volume of people on the street is pretty wild to witness. People don’t realize they’re one fiscal misstep or hospital emergency or whatever away from being that. It’s not that far away, it’s not as far away as you’d like to think. Surely there’s some kind of solution.”
The song is followed by “Wildfire” and “Surveillance”, the former a driving cut of arpeggiated synths and cutting bass and the latter sludgy cut of sci-fi noise punk chaos–it’s music so visceral that it feels incredibly fitting that the band witnessed an eclipse and an earthquake while they were in New York recording the EP. As Deedee sings of environmental decay and the unraveling of our reality, a sense of grim determination begins to become clear throughout No Separation. While not despondent, these songs are realistic about the dark challenges that are becoming more and more present in modern life. “A lot of the lyrics on these songs are pretty straight forward,” they explain. “We’re just seeing some really unnatural things–things that we’re doing, they’re not just happening, we’re the cause.” On the EP’s title track, Deedee ties together our inner lives and the outside world, singing “I can feel it now, no separation from what I feel and how,” with a stirringly melodic delivery previously unheard in MSPAINT’s work. “It’s sort of about how we’re connected to each other, and to the world, and to its disasters,” they say. “It’s just this collision of our lives and corporate greed and all these elements coming together. It’s about how at the end of the day the world’s been sold out from under us before we can even have our say, but we’re not powerless to fight against it–there’s hopefulness in no separation.”
The EP comes to a close with “Angel,” one of the most spectacular and instantly captivating songs MSPAINT have ever crafted. Unfolding around an otherworldly synth line that’s somehow melodic and disconcerting all at once, the track grows into a towering mass of growling bass and keyboard freakouts as Deedee roars, “there is no control, just controlling yourself.” The song is unabashedly poppy but filtered through the raw and unbridled strangeness of MSPAINT; it’s anthemic yet grounded, powered by a hard-edged kind of optimism. “It’s definitely different from the way I would usually write for the band,” Deedee explains. “It’s something you can sing along to, but it’s also something that maybe you’re saying to yourself that feels good–some positive thinking. I felt like we succeeded at bringing poppier elements into our space and making them our own instead of trying to bring what we do into a pop space.” It might seem like a small distinction, but it’s an important one for a band that’s constantly pushing themselves and trying new things. No Separation makes it clear that MSPAINT could be literally anything, but that they will only ever be what they want to be.
