My Grey Horse follow last year’s ‘The Marley Banks EP’ with a second short-player that serves as an enticing demonstration of what may be in store when their first album arrives (they’re working on their first full-length as we speak).

‘Stop Before the Dry River’ is noticeably unadorned; no flashy production or suspicious vocal tweaking has been force-fed into the make-up of the four songs, and if a group weren’t capable of producing the goods in such a stripped-down sonic environment, we’d quickly know about it. In this case, though, it’s a pleasure to find that the band thrives in such a setting, appearing completely comfortable and delivering up consistently interesting tracks. Indeed, numbers like ‘Need Wood’ and ‘Last Chance’ are difficult to imagine done any other way. The former – the record’s opener and scene-setter – is a moody teenager of a song, capable of dreamy highs and stroppy-sounding lows embodied in the interplay between the vocals in verse and chorus. The first is carried off by lead Peter Butler, whose drawn-out syllables end each line in a half-emphatic, half-exhausted exhalation; his voice not quite what you’d call rugged, but not too far away. Then comes the chorus: lyrically, there isn’t much to report but that hardly registers as the attention is wholly consumed by the happily lethargic harmonies provided by the rest of the band. They all get involved on the simple ‘aaaaaahs’, producing a glorious euphoria that seems to spiral and dance drunkenly on a late-July breeze. All of this unfolds in so charmingly spartan a fashion that it begins to feel as though you’re listening in on a brilliant practice session in the band’s garage, beer in hand, and the weekend beckoning. It’s an organic tone that’s confident and genuine and is kept alive for the rest of the record.

Alongside this relaxed authenticity, the other most noteworthy element of the songs are their lyrics: almost uniformly dark and occupied with the murkier side of existence, it occasionally astonishes to find that the words riding above the musical action are as black as they are. The opening riff of ‘Last Chance’, for example, is a compulsively listenable one as it writhes and bounds around, caring for nothing but hooking the listener in an addictive track; on second and third listens, however, it starts to feel a bit like a facetious distraction from the subject at hand:

Too drunk to sleep
The words have come and gone
Waiting to live
Hoping to die all in one

This sort of duality creates a brilliant tension that, to varying extents, is present throughout the EP and adds a depth to the songs that it’s possible to miss amongst all the laid-back musicality. It proves that My Grey Horse are heading in a direction that it will be worth us following, and in a kind of creative form that should put us on red alert for the arrival of their debut LP.