WAIN’s debut EP, “Still Colorful”, arrives not as a singular declaration but as a meticulously curated gallery of the self, with one man acting as architect, painter, and lighting technician all at once. It’s an unusual feeling, listening to it. You get the sense that you’re touring a house designed and built by a single, obsessive artisan, but where every room is inhabited by a different ghost, each telling you a piece of the owner’s story. It’s a fascinating, and at times beautifully disorienting, project.
One cannot properly engage with this EP without first understanding WAIN’s distinct position. Having already produced, written, or mixed over a hundred tracks for a sprawling map of international artists, he is no newcomer to the craft of sound. He is a sonic tailor, accustomed to cutting the cloth to fit another’s form. On “Still Colorful”, however, he turns that craft inward. The decision to feature a different vocalist and co-writer for each of the eight tracks could have resulted in a disjointed compilation, a mere showcase of his production Rolodex. Instead, it becomes the EP’s central magic trick.
WAIN doesn’t just produce these artists; he casts them. Each voice is a specific emotional color he needs to paint the suffocating anxiety, the cyclical heartbreak, and the faint glint of resilience that define the EP’s narrative—the messy, bewildering business of being in your twenties. His production is the consistent landscape, the unifying aesthetic that allows these disparate voices to feel like chapters in the same book.
Then there is the mix, a discipline often overlooked but which, in WAIN’s hands, becomes a storytelling tool of startling intimacy. He self-mixed the entire record, and you can feel his fingerprint on every frequency. It’s in the way a vulnerable vocal is pushed so far forward it feels like a secret being confided directly into your ear, while the cinematic pads swell and recede like a tide pulling at a distant shore. The space he creates is palpable. Some tracks feel claustrophobic, the air thick with overlapping thoughts and looping synth lines, perfectly mirroring the theme of a mind trapped in anxiety. Others feel stark and cavernous, an acoustic guitar echoing into a silence that speaks volumes about loneliness. This isn’t just balancing levels; it’s emotional geography. He’s deciding whether you stand in the room with the singer or watch them through a rain-streaked window.
And through all this technical prowess, the heart of WAIN, the artist beats insistently. This is his story. The search for a “home” that isn’t a place but a state of being, the wrestling with identity, the exhaustion of a love that won’t die but can’t live—it’s all there, encoded in the very structure of the music. The blend of organic, acoustic instruments with subtle electronic textures feels like a perfect metaphor for the EP’s theme: the search for something real and true within a life increasingly mediated by digital noise. It sounds, at times, like finding a perfectly formed fern growing in the shadow of a server farm.
With a relocation to Los Angeles on the horizon, “Still Colorful” feels like both a final thesis on one chapter of life and a powerful calling card for the next. It’s the work of a creator who has mastered the ability to build worlds for others and has now, finally, built one for himself. After living inside this meticulously constructed space, you’re left with a curious question: when one man builds a home for eight different souls, who is it really for?
