Hyperdrive and Talulah Ruby are a couple, unafraid. Even through three songs, a trueness of feeling can be felt, not only in relation to your own experiences, but to Talulah’s too. It is maybe the standout success of this EP that by bringing the music itself so close to a rawness of her own experience, the space sometimes felt between listener and music is completely removed. Listening to Hyperdrive becomes a parallel experience, at once going through your own thoughts, but also, through a thin, skilful line of musical separation, Talulah’s too.
It opens with the titular track, an immediately brilliant, different mix of guitar sooth and R&B - not looking to mash the two together but rather tread a path of new steps entirely. Right at the top of the EP is where this vulnerability and closeness
comes in, with the song taking breaks at some of its most heightened points for Talulah to express, with all the emotion and sensitivity that will come to define this body of work: ‘you think I’m BIASSED’, and, later, ‘I brought you FLOWERS’. How they’re contextualised in the song - how they’re pushed out with something fierce, and proud, but also somehow defenceless - against the smoothness of the song and the ability it has to take you away, particularly sticks. This does so in perpetuity with the EP, as these ideas, and that bare look into the mechanics of feeling, become more alive throughout.
The pulse that runs through the EP is electronic; each subtle, recurring, constant sound of this a reminder that the thing it pulses through - a journey of divinity; this beautiful, fluid, morphing sanctity in itself is something that seeks a separation from the superficial. It understands that the expression of the most intimate extents of our experiences cannot simply be through the things that have been done before, and the way things have been said before.
There are many things in Hyperdrive - structurally and conceptually - that bring the record together to make it the listening experience that it is. One of the largest, and most impactful, is the voice. It’s the loudest, most lasting piece of the EP in retrospect. It feels like it’s the only voice at all, when listening. Nowhere in the record does Talulah’s vocal overstate itself - nowhere does it need to, and indeed its softness becomes intrinsically central when the EP quietens down, often to only one layer. The weight of itself carries the meaning on its own. It is what feels like that final key to the complex lock of letting yourself feel, and is totally foundational to the rest of the successes of the EP as a whole.
Hyperdrive welcomes into its very own iridescence the parts of the emotional experience we may seek to dampen, or detach from, and breathes a beautiful, freeing life into them, allowing a space and tenderness that resonates somewhere deep. The EP surpasses itself into an experience of listening that seems to create thoughts and feelings that feel totally unique to you; that gap between the listener and the music becoming ever smaller, and intimacy of the record at distinct highs.
The bold, but careful, choices that serve as the elements to this EP - the faraway stars in a cosmos of a three-piece - come together to do more than just be a collection of songs. It creates space. A space exclusively for the listener, to be exposed to the experience of a feeling so raw to the truth. A journey to go through, to feel, and - mostly - to see in a beautifully sensitive, unsheltered way.
Hyperdrive feels naked of the things that seem to distract the soul in us, and serves as an invitation to listeners to look inward in finding that greater truth to self, in the same way some may choose to look upward. It is something of hope. It’s something of purity. Of healing. In many ways this EP was created with experiment in its nature, and in many more ways this experiment was a resounding success.