EP Review: By Million Wires – Not Over
Fourteen years is a long time to sit on an unfinished thought. Long enough for the thought to calcify, for the room where you had it to get demolished, for everyone who might have cared to move on to other rooms. By Million Wires, a project anchored by Tarnów-based guitarist and songwriter Mirek Skrok, spent exactly that long between their first attempt at existence and Not Over — their debut EP, released May 1st. The title, presumably, is not a coincidence.
Over opens with nearly ninety seconds of instrumental — not quite melody, not quite texture, somewhere in between. The guitars occupy the entire sonic space the way vegetation takes over an empty lot: first one shoot breaks through, then another, then a sapling somewhere, and suddenly you're inside a dense polyphonic landscape.
When the vocals arrive, they carry a fishbone of sadness at their core, with everything else growing around it. The backing vocals add density and — paradoxically — lightness at the same time. Atmospheric verses, a more direct and driving chorus: it's the early Coldplay blueprint, the Yellow vibe specifically. Melancholic but robust, and in that robustness there's actual forward motion — the kind of music people reach for in difficult moments because it meets them in their sadness and then quietly pushes them through it.
Glass Houses wraps you in the same musical blanket — arpeggiated guitars, warm threading leads — but the subject matter cuts against that comfort. The song is about the deceptive nature of reality and our grip on it, and the way it tells that story holds both bitterness and warmth at once: the bitterness opens your eyes, the warmth gives you ground to stand on.
The ending crosses into post-rock territory — explosive and enveloping at the same time — and it's one of the strongest moments on the record.
I Know Better is about carving your own path when everyone around you has already decided which direction you should be heading. The song enacts this literally: while the rest of the herd moves in four-four, this one chooses a different gait — a triple meter that gives the whole thing a waltzing, slightly sideways momentum. The opening guitar lines hypnotize before anything else happens, and that hypnosis carries the track's dramatic weight along with the lyrics.
Lost or Won — arpeggiated guitars, a stumbling rhythm, melancholic melodies with long sustained notes — sits comfortably in the neighborhood of Radiohead's In Rainbows. But the song builds on its own terms, and the way its dramaturgy unfolds is distinctly By Million Wires: it ends in a squall of guitars, a sonic wall that knocks you flat and leaves you standing there with nothing to say. The kind of moment that, live, probably tips over into something close to catharsis.
Which makes Runaway all the more disorienting — in the best sense. The opening guitar riff doesn't have an obvious rock analogue; something from classical music comes to mind instead — the swarming propulsion of Rimsky-Korsakov, or Wagner. The groove is heavy and viscous, like moving through unfamiliar terrain somewhere in the American south, among swamps and alligators and mosquitoes that won't leave you alone. It's a journey in itself. But it still leaves space for the kind of emotional outbursts that, by this point in the record, I'd already come to think of as the band's signature — and without which I'm not sure I'd have fallen for By Million Wires as hard as I did, having spent just twenty-something minutes with them.
Not Over is a rare kind of record in the days of countless playlists filled with a version of atmospheric rock that exists purely as furniture — something to put on while you stare at the ceiling and feel vaguely cinematic about your problems. This album is a different kind of beast. Apart from the gut-wrenching yet heart-warming lyrics, these five songs have amazing melodies and guitar parts that you find yourself humming two days later without knowing why, and a quality that's harder to name: they make you feel like something is going to be okay, without telling you what or why or when. That's not nothing. In fact, right now, that's a lot.
Fourteen years is a long time. Turns out it was worth all the wait.
Over opens with nearly ninety seconds of instrumental — not quite melody, not quite texture, somewhere in between. The guitars occupy the entire sonic space the way vegetation takes over an empty lot: first one shoot breaks through, then another, then a sapling somewhere, and suddenly you're inside a dense polyphonic landscape.
When the vocals arrive, they carry a fishbone of sadness at their core, with everything else growing around it. The backing vocals add density and — paradoxically — lightness at the same time. Atmospheric verses, a more direct and driving chorus: it's the early Coldplay blueprint, the Yellow vibe specifically. Melancholic but robust, and in that robustness there's actual forward motion — the kind of music people reach for in difficult moments because it meets them in their sadness and then quietly pushes them through it.
Glass Houses wraps you in the same musical blanket — arpeggiated guitars, warm threading leads — but the subject matter cuts against that comfort. The song is about the deceptive nature of reality and our grip on it, and the way it tells that story holds both bitterness and warmth at once: the bitterness opens your eyes, the warmth gives you ground to stand on.
The ending crosses into post-rock territory — explosive and enveloping at the same time — and it's one of the strongest moments on the record.
I Know Better is about carving your own path when everyone around you has already decided which direction you should be heading. The song enacts this literally: while the rest of the herd moves in four-four, this one chooses a different gait — a triple meter that gives the whole thing a waltzing, slightly sideways momentum. The opening guitar lines hypnotize before anything else happens, and that hypnosis carries the track's dramatic weight along with the lyrics.
Lost or Won — arpeggiated guitars, a stumbling rhythm, melancholic melodies with long sustained notes — sits comfortably in the neighborhood of Radiohead's In Rainbows. But the song builds on its own terms, and the way its dramaturgy unfolds is distinctly By Million Wires: it ends in a squall of guitars, a sonic wall that knocks you flat and leaves you standing there with nothing to say. The kind of moment that, live, probably tips over into something close to catharsis.
Which makes Runaway all the more disorienting — in the best sense. The opening guitar riff doesn't have an obvious rock analogue; something from classical music comes to mind instead — the swarming propulsion of Rimsky-Korsakov, or Wagner. The groove is heavy and viscous, like moving through unfamiliar terrain somewhere in the American south, among swamps and alligators and mosquitoes that won't leave you alone. It's a journey in itself. But it still leaves space for the kind of emotional outbursts that, by this point in the record, I'd already come to think of as the band's signature — and without which I'm not sure I'd have fallen for By Million Wires as hard as I did, having spent just twenty-something minutes with them.
Not Over is a rare kind of record in the days of countless playlists filled with a version of atmospheric rock that exists purely as furniture — something to put on while you stare at the ceiling and feel vaguely cinematic about your problems. This album is a different kind of beast. Apart from the gut-wrenching yet heart-warming lyrics, these five songs have amazing melodies and guitar parts that you find yourself humming two days later without knowing why, and a quality that's harder to name: they make you feel like something is going to be okay, without telling you what or why or when. That's not nothing. In fact, right now, that's a lot.
Fourteen years is a long time. Turns out it was worth all the wait.