Greg Mendez: First Time / Alone

First Time / Alone, Greg Mendez's new EP and first release with Dead Oceans, came together in late summer and early fall of 2023; the songs here appear in the order in which they were written, recorded straight to four-track in the small spare room of his West Philadelphia apartment. It's a four song arc, aspectral passageway, one brief and fluid body of work that hangs together from the mournful opening of "Mountain Dew Hell" to the pitched-up vocals on "Pain Meds," a tiny song floundering in the enormity of grief. The experience of listening through is like waking up from a half-remembered dream, a shadow in the corner of the room, a strange solitude, a temporal New York autumn with gray skies and naked trees. But while the release is sparse and spontaneous, it's tactile and consuming, a glimpse into the beautiful, lonely worlds that live in the core of a Greg Mendez song. First Time / Alone is the inverse of his 2023 self-titled album, a meticulous and labored-over collection of songs that went on to become a surprise slowburn success. Mendez has released music in various capacities across 15 years living in Philadelphia and New York, but the self-titled was what propelled him to a wider attention, a critical breakthrough on best-of lists from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Paste, and more. That forward momentum came to a quick halt following an intensive surgery on his right wrist in the summer of 2023 - a four-month purgatory of bad TV, canceled touring, and physical therapy ensued, a painful stretch of boredom leaving Mendez unable to play guitar. "Mountain Dew Hell" and "First Time," the funerealA-side of the EP, are time capsules of that fever-dream; "Alone"was the first song Mendez wrote once he was able to play guitaragain. Likely none of the songs would have existed as-is ifMendez's right hand hadn't been out of commission, but they'reartful in their directness and simplicity. He initially thought hewould need to refine them, building them out to the same scaleas self-titled, but the more he returned to the work, the more itfelt complete and true as-is.Mendez is an intuitive songwriter, melodies channeled throughether, a storyteller who across his catalog has chronicled vividviolence and instability - a wallet chain to the head, a crackhouse arrest, the misdeeds from addiction that hang aroundlike a ghost of past lives - but it's threaded together with lovesongs, too, with odes to friendship, true dedication, the thingsthat can buoy one through the worst. Mendez has a habit ofnoticing those things, of finding the light, exacting poetry fromeven the bleakest, shit-caked situations. In his songs there is aninnate ability to balance grit with gentleness, cruelties rewrittenthrough preternatural sweetness, a heart thrummingunendingly, confidently, through the dark.