Indie rock darlings Velvet Sun are back on the scene with Empire, a four-track EP that reasserts the band's title as one of modern rock's most evocative entities. Empire is an exhilarating sprint from a band that knows precisely where it has been.
Guided by the soaring title track, "Empire," the New York-born, Florida-based band offers a breathtaking lesson in contrast. Psychedelic basslines swell, while frontman Scott Weinkle's ethereal vocals pierce through the smog with a haunting clarity. The song rises and sounds like a skyline in a 21st-century pulse of '90s alt-rock.
Released earlier as a single, it carries on the Velvet Sun tradition of leveraging emotion into twisted pop gold, combining jangly guitar hooks with lyrics that hurt in all the right ways. It's a romantic daydream with a hint of regret classic for Velvet Sun territory.
But the real treasures are in the second half. "Star" is a dreamy slow burn that conveys an impression of warmth and yearning, while "Wonder" closes the EP with delicate urgency, stacking reverb-bathed riffs over a rhythm section that throbs like a restless heart.
With "Empire" Velvet Sun doesn't simply hark back to their Britpop-drenched beginnings. They progress them. The result is a brief, emotive album with purifying graphics. Velvet Sun has made their kingdom. Now it's time to discover the Empire.