Heryland

ear gets as up close and personal as their name suggests.

As of writing this, ear has 272,198 monthly listeners, despite their first single, Nerves, being less than a year old, and it is far from hard to see why. The electronic/glitch pop/digital hardcore/twee pop duo feel as fresh as they are difficult to categorise, and their debut album The Most Dear and the Future feels off kilter in the most refreshing way. It’s the sort of album that will be cited years from now in conversation around other artist’s influences.

In many ways, ear feels like a series of voice notes spliced with loose ideas for songs’ but this stripped back sound creates a touching intimacy; each song feels like a snapshot or moment, quietly painting a picture by focusing on the details, big and small. It feels important to bring up the bigger moments (many of their songs contain something at least resembling a beat drop), but these larger sounds often highlight smaller choices surrounding them, especially when paired with the gentle vocals. The album’s title track, a hushed, digital reflection on moving on from a relationship, builds up to jarring industrial percussion with moments of ambient noise jumping in and out of the track. It feels like a magnifying glass on something private in the middle of something massive, or perhaps something much larger hidden in a small moment. The realisation that you don’t think about someone anymore can feel profound but usually happens in a personal moment of self reflection.

Much of ear’s work evokes this feeling to me in a way I haven’t heard before. Jonah Paz, one half of the duo, speaks about his folk-twee influences across multiple interviews, with the group noting that cute intimacy shining through their work despite clashing with their electronic hardcore soundscape, courtesy of ear’s other half Yaelle Avtan. In Jonah’s words: “ear is actually twee as shit if you think about it”.

Aesthetically speaking, ear revels in the online experience, both in a nostalgic sense (the video for Nerve is a mashup of seemingly random low res clips), and in a present one (Real Life’s video is screen recorded over multiple video calls). Tastefully reflecting online culture is very difficult thing to do, as it’s easy to come off as pandering, dated, or for lack of a better word, cringe. Taylor Swift recently sang about “girlbossing too close to the sun”, a line that could now easily be seen as foreshadowing for her album’s critical reception, but such “how do you do, fellow kids” energy is nowhere to be seen in ear’s online references. Instead, they look at the internet as a visual description of their intimate sound, as Nerve’s video finds random YouTube videos, niche to the point that stumbling into them feels almost invasive, and Real Life shows isolated people dancing, shared only through their cameras to the other side of a call. ear throw in some shitpost adjacent imagery too, sampling the Okay Vine in Real Life, and choosing slightly uncomfortable pixelated imagery for their covers, but there is nothing obnoxious or loud about it, but rather it furthers the feeling that you are finding something private. Despite over 200,000 monthly listeners, finding ear’s music felt to me like the algorithm suggesting a random YouTube video from a decade ago, with anywhere from 100 to a million views.

I have no idea where ear will go next, or what their legacy will be. They are currently touring with Yung Lean for the Forever Yung Tour, which gives me hope that their recognition and audience only continues to grow. How their sound will evolve is a hard to say, but after three singles and a stunning first album I’m confident they’ll continue to be worth your time.