A 1922 Steinway B at Clubhouse in Rhinebeck, NY. Mackenzie Shivers sat down at it, and suddenly the pop record she had intended to make evaporated.

In this space, the losses of 2024 were not events, but a heavy snowfall that refused to melt. They stuck and froze and formed into drifts. Shivers embarked on an attempt to - if not to thaw, at least to mold these memories. Writing was a ritual of dismantling and readjusting until the music mirrored the friction of her new reality. She was standing at the intersection of two devotions: the quiet, steady breath of a sleeping child and the loud, insistent pulse of an unwritten score.

Her new EP 'Everything’s A Vibe' is the sound of that collision. It is the eight-year-old girl who ran home from movie theaters to find the architecture of John Williams in her fingertips, now grown and standing in the center of a glitching world. It is the salt-air of an Irish pub bleeding into the fluorescent artifice of a soda pop ad.

Inside the music, the sky is perpetually Gemini and the world is a "chapel of bones," yet Shivers is busy drawing a "violent, necessary green" out of the winter. She watches the screen—the influencers, the news cycles, the frantic demand to "hit the light just right"—and she chooses to siphon that dissonance into something that’s more real, or at least more personal, or at least less alienating.

'Everything’s A Vibe' is a piano homecoming. It is an imagined future built from the scraps of the past. It is a suggestion that the only way to survive drowning is to see the beauty in the deep. Here, the body may grow cold and the moon may wane, but the song is a limitless thing. 

-M Derby