Marcane confronts his past on genre-bending EP, “EPHEMERAL”
On EPHEMERAL, Marcane doesn’t flirt with darkness so much as walk straight into it and somehow emerges with something undeniably real and alive. The six-song EP is less a collection of tracks than a document of survival, created during a period when music became a lifeline rather than a luxury. Written as he grappled with an official diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, the project captures an artist choosing to move through pain instead of around it. He’s transformed that inner chaos into a body of work that is downright excellent, captivating, and instrumentally beautiful.
Currently based in Manchester, Marcane has long resisted genre confinement, and EPHEMERAL thrives in infusing so much sound and style into something beyond confident. The EP features rock-forward instrumentation with subtle electronic textures, pairing crushing guitars and thunderous drums with modern production flourishes rooted in 808’s and a meticulous sound design that’s built for headphones. Years spent touring with metalcore bands add a ton of heft to the sound, but its emotional core comes purely from the lyrics and his delivery. This is heavy music not only in volume, but in meaning.
Vocally, Marcane is fearless. Explosive performances like on the opener “Despite The Sharpest Knives” or “Talk To Me” shift between vulnerable melodics and well-timed screams that feel less like stylistic choices and more like emotional necessity. The dynamic range mirrors the psychological push and pull at the heart of the EP, moments of quiet introspection giving way to overwhelming intensity. There’s these applied vocal effects and production treatments that really heighten the contrast, creating a sense of almost disorientation that feels intentional. You’re fully inside the artist’s headspace, but particularly so on that spoken word section during the end of “Hospital Beds”.
Lyrically, the EP legitimately feels poetic, confronting trauma without romanticizing it. There’s an honesty here that’s difficult to manufacture, a sense that these songs exist because they had to. You can feel the influences from his favorite artists like My Chemical Romance or Deftones, yet EPHEMERAL never collapses into imitation. This thing is as original as you could possibly get while paying slight homage to some living legends. Honestly even putting a genre label on it would be borderline impossible considering there is soo much going on sonically.
It’s very obviosuly a snapshot of a specific, painful chapter in Marcane’s life, preserved not as a wound but kind of as a shoulder to lean on for those potentially going through the same. The production is polished yet raw, the songwriting deeply personal but human. By the EP’s end, he hasn’t offered a tidy resolution, but something more powerful. You’ve got to confront those moments in your life to help get past it and we confidently feel that he’s done a magnificent job in working towards it.
So please, do yourselves a favor and click those links below to listen in, follow along, and of course to stay tuned for more.
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