7/10

There is an overwhelming sense of atmosphere hanging over RIOT SON’s debut EP 'My Love Is A Promise That I Can’t Keep'. Not atmosphere in the superficial sense of layered reverb and dark aesthetics alone, but the feeling of a project shaped in isolation, built carefully from emotional collapse, and slowly reconstructed into something strangely comforting.

Emerging from Boone, North Carolina, RIOT SON frames his sound as “Appalachian Gloom,” and while that description risks sounding overly conceptual on paper, the EP itself fully earns the term. Across these three tracks, post-punk textures, dream-pop haze and early-2000s emo vulnerability fold together naturally, creating something that feels suspended somewhere between mountain fog and neon-lit insomnia.

The release’s emotional centrepiece is the closing 'Slowly Without You', a track that captures the EP’s entire identity in miniature. The production feels cavernous yet intimate at once, as if the vocals are ricocheting through empty halls before collapsing inward into whispered confession. There are echoes of Robert Smith in the fragile melodic phrasing, while the emotional urgency occasionally recalls the theatrical ache of Gerard Way. Yet the song never feels derivative as RIOT SON filters those influences through his own distinctly rural melancholy.

There is also a strong sense of physical place running through the EP. 'Loneliest At Best' and 'What Makes You Think' capture the imagery of late-night drives through the Blue Ridge Parkway, isolated bedrooms and fog-covered lakes quietly permeates the music without turning it into folklore romanticism. Here, Boone becomes an emotional condition; somewhere between confinement and reflection.

At times, the EP leans heavily into its own mythology, occasionally threatening to disappear beneath the weight of its aesthetic language. But when RIOT SON allows the songwriting itself to breathe, the project becomes genuinely affecting. The closing whispered refrain that gives the EP its title lands as the sound of someone confronting their own emotional limitations in real time.

For a debut collection, 'My Love Is A Promise That I Can’t Keep' feels remarkably self-assured. RIOT SON already possesses a clear understanding of the emotional world he wants to create, and more importantly, how to make us inhabit it alongside him.

This is not simply another bedroom-recorded indie release chasing nostalgia for post-punk or emo revivalism. It feels more personal than that. More isolated. More lived-in. And within that darkness, RIOT SON has managed to uncover something unexpectedly intimate.