Josephine Olivia Finds Stillness Working Alone on EP1

EP1 finds Josephine Olivia making something entirely on her own. Four songs she wrote, performed, and produced without a band around her, which after more than fifteen years of working inside bands is the whole point. The record, out via Brooklyn label Trash Casual, moves between goth, dark electronic textures, and flashes of indie atmosphere.

Olivia has been a fixture in the Baltimore and DC scenes for over fifteen years, and she plays in VOSH, whose goth, post-punk, and metal has put the band on stages with The Psychedelic Furs, Nitzer Ebb, and Bauhaus's Peter Murphy. She has toured across North America, Europe, and the UK, and appeared in videos for Cigarettes After Sex last year. The EP points the other way, inward.

She describes it as "a deeper introduction into the world Josephine Olivia is creating." The opener sets a sinister choir against a harsh, gnawing saw, introducing a tension that sticks around through the rest of the record. "Reject," already released as a single, offers familiar footing before "Climbing Out" goes hazier. Its ambient, measured melody reaches toward hope but never completely shakes its loneliness. "Forest" closes on layered harmonies and repetition, like standing alone under a canopy at dusk, right where solitude starts to feel a little like paranoia.

Stillness is what Olivia is after. She hopes EP1 will have a centering, grounding effect — something that can bring the listener back to stillness in a world of constant change and movement. Working alone also changed the way Olivia reached the songs. With VOSH and her other band work, there are people to bounce ideas off of, and that exchange opens up a different kind of creative instinct. This time, there was nobody else to run things past.

"For me, this music has been a lesson of healing," she says. Writing and producing the material herself gave Olivia room to dig into emotions she had ignored while learning an entirely new side of making records. She sees the songs as more vulnerable than her band work because there is no collaborative layer between the first impulse and what comes out the other end. That independence is part of what gives EP1 its intimacy. Olivia has described the project as a way to connect and articulate something without speaking, but also as an act of showing up without filtering herself through anyone else's vision.

Follow Josephine Olivia.