ABOUT PICTURESQUE: Time has become an increasingly abstract concept since the pandemic, not least for bands. For while there’s always a distance between the writing of a record and its release, the last few years have truly highlighted the reality of that. It’s something Picturesque have captured perfectly with their brand new EP,
IYKYK. Its six tracks might be coming out now, but they’re a very specific snapshot of the past – what’s more, a past that everyone in the world experienced collectively at the same time, and the accompanying sense of dread, uncertainty and inertia that came with it. It means that
IYKYK—shorthand, of course, for ‘if you know, you know’—paints a picture simultaneously of both who Picturesque—vocalist Kyle Hollis, guitarists Zach Williamson and Dylan Forrester, and bassist Jordan Greenway—are and were.
“These songs were written during the earlier days of the pandemic,” explains Williamson. “We’re notoriously slow songwriters, but since we were locked inside, we decided to be productive. So we locked ourselves in a room and wrote, and this is what came out.”
The end result is an EP with which the band set out to challenge themselves, even if—or perhaps precisely because—that seemed like an impossible task at the time. Lead single “Hopeless” captures that frustration that most of us felt at the start of the pandemic. It begins with what almost sounds like a medieval guitar-line backed with a fuzzy crackle similar to an old, overplayed piece of vinyl. But then it suddenly jumps across centuries into the present—or perhaps the near-future—and the song explodes into a swathe of beats, synths, guitars and distorted vocals. A true blast of pop magnificence, while it retains some of the post-hardcore influences and sounds from the band’s early days, it’s really more a calculated step forward into the next phase of their career. At the same time, it’s also a song about being and feeling stuck on numerous levels, both literal and metaphorical, all of which play into its lyrics and the urgent, breathless melody that propels it. Ironically, the song itself is an act of defiance, a rush of adrenaline that bursts through that feeling of futility, defeating the very thing at the heart of its subject matter.
And while the band’s shift away from their musical roots started with 2020’s second album, Do You Feel OK?, it truly is in full force here. For while that record was a world away from Back To Beautiful, their 2017 debut full-length, this EP is a galaxy away.
“Musically, I think every artist kind of hits the threshold for the scene that they came up in, or the particular demographic of their listeners,” the guitarist says. “We asked ourselves ‘How do we break out of just being a rock band, or a Warped Tour band?’ Because we don’t want to be seen as that. We want to be much more.”
The emphatic answer to that question is contained within these six songs. Like most Picturesque songs, these EP tracks tell specific stories, but are also riddled with hidden meanings and secret references. One of the topics “Hopeless” deals with, for instance, is Hollis being taken away from his father when he was a child. It’s a harrowing subject matter that adds greatly to the fraught and frantic tension and emotion that permeates the song.
“He was kidnapped by his biological mother,” Williamson says. “‘Kidnap’ may be a strong word, but that’s the word Kyle uses—he was taken away from his father and held and nobody was able to contact him. And basically his dad and a private detective came to grab him and take him back. So we took inspiration from being stuck in this kind of rundown house in southern Arkansas and put it into the verses a little bit.”
IYKYK will be released on April 21st, 2023 on Equal Vision Records
