8/10

There’s a particular thrill when a band refuses to sit still, and on 'Cope', Liquid Pennies sound gloriously unwilling to stay in one place for long. Continuing the journey hinted at on their recent album 'Fore', this new collection detonates, stretches, dissolves, and rebuilds that ethos in stranger and more exhilarating forms. What arrives is a miniature odyssey through pressure, persistence, and creative reinvention.

From its first moments of the eight-minute title-track, the EP announces intent with swagger and unease in equal measure. Guitars surge and fracture, rhythms push forward with stubborn momentum, and layers stack until the whole thing feels like it might tip over at any second. The brilliance lies in its refusal to climax in a predictable way, instead, the track unravels, slows, and disintegrates into a hazy comedown, as if the band are deliberately letting the tension bleed out in real time. It’s a thrilling act of restraint and release, and one that sets the tone for everything that follows.

That momentum slides seamlessly into 'Floating Mote', which feels like drifting through a half-remembered dream. Here, Liquid Pennies trade impact for immersion. Sound expands outward, washes of tone blur into one another, and percussion flickers like distant light through fog. It’s the subtle rhythmic flourishes keep the track gently alive, breathing, and evolving.

Then comes the EP’s most daring turn. 'Long Fuse' abandons familiar tools entirely and steps into a synthetic universe of pulsing circuitry and fractured beats. Where earlier tracks wrestle with weight and gravity, this one dances in abstraction, assembling emotion from samples and programmed motion. It’s a bold pivot that never feels gimmicky; instead, it reveals how elastic the band’s identity has become.

What ties these disparate pieces together is a quiet but powerful emotional thread. Each track feels like a different response to friction: confrontation, escape, experimentation, and reflection. The production mirrors that journey, shifting from raw immediacy to spectral ambience to precise electronic architecture, always in service of feeling rather than novelty.

Liquid Pennies have crafted a release that’s compact yet expansive. 'Cope' doesn’t offer easy answers or neat resolutions, and that’s precisely its strength. It captures the act of continuing, adapting, and finding new shapes when the old ones no longer hold. This is a band leaning boldly into uncertainty, and sounding more alive because of it.