7/10

With his latest collection 'Home (is a folk-rock mixtape)', Oaken Lee offers a weathered map of life’s turning points, drawn in pencil, tape hiss, and open-tuned guitars. It’s a quietly ambitious EP that unravels the complex arc of growing up, growing out, and circling back again.

Pieced together across two years of early mornings and late nights in Tottenham, the release brims with a lived-in intimacy. There’s no rush here, only time stretched long across memory, change, and reflection. These songs flicker with the warm imperfection of cassette culture and DIY folk traditions.

Tracks like 'One Summer Gone' and 'Pick a Dead Celebrity' lean into youthful detachment and the strange nostalgia that follows, while 'Home' and 'Where the Leaves Don’t Fall' arrive like morning light after the storm. The EP wanders, but purposefully so. Between the whispered warmth of Sparklehorse and the looping introspection of Cassandra Jenkins, Lee balances traditional folk storytelling with experimental hues, such as drum machines and fuzzy bass interlacing with acoustic laments.

Vocally, Lee’s delivery is hushed, almost confessional, giving the sense that these songs were written to process something deeply felt. 'Where Now?' shifts the lens outward, its concern for the wider world grounded in the same emotional clarity that threads through the personal.

Ultimately, 'Home (is a folk-rock mixtape)' is an EP about thresholds; between past and present, youth and adulthood, leaving and returning. It’s not trying to define what home is, but rather, how we keep chasing it, even as it keeps changing shape. With this collection, Oaken Lee reminds us that home is a feeling we’re always trying to reassemble from the pieces we carry.