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Photo: Abbie Pitre

Songwriting visionary Genevieve Stokes has returned to her post as indie pop’s dark academia icon with her new EP, Catching Rabbits.

There’s an ode to early 2000s indie songwriting in the EP’s opener, “Habits.” I hear some Regina Spector quirkiness in the bouncing acoustic piano, while notes of Fiona Apple dance in the rolling drumbeat and moody chord progression. Stokes’ embrace of her originality is admirable—the scarlet hues of the piano that lives at the heart of this EP become a signature for the artist’s tone. "Habits” showcases Stokes’ ability to curate a production style that is both ethereal and clean. The warm, piano-driven track is decorated with unexpected nuances like plucked synth strings, chiming bells, and rhythmic, breathless background vocals.

“You & Me” flows on a heartbeat of lush harmony layers. Stokes cycles through the line “it’s never enough,” instilling a different meaning into each repetition throughout the outro: from bitterness to grief, realization to complacency. Meanwhile, “Can I” pulses with excited urgency as amber-hued drums patter eagerly beneath a percussive melody.

We’re given a moment to reflect in “Book of Memories,” which guides us along a stream-of-consciousness recall of a relationship. This track feels delicate to me in the way that the pages of a vintage book might crumble in your hands with too heavy of a touch—much like the nature of love itself. The minimalistic production lets “Book of Memories” breathe into its fragility, draping ambient strings and distant percussion over the flushed piano. The accompanying music video is the perfect Genevieve Stokes visualizer, where the indie songwriter and a plague doctor break up in reverse, running hand in hand through a burning landscape. It’s both unsettling and touching, existing in this mildly Victorian aesthetic that Stokes cultivates.

“This EP is more introspective and experimental than my first project and I think it reflects a change in my connection to reality and the relationships in my life,” Stokes. “‘Catching Rabbits’ is my more uplifting take on the phrase ‘chasing rabbits’— that it’s possible to achieve what seems out of reach, and to escape the tempting illusions of the mind.” 

“Mara” is an intimate dedication told equally through its words and composition. The arrangement in this track is particularly emotive, spiraling anxiously in the verses to then settle in the chorus, illustrating the impact of the song’s subject, Mara. We don’t even know Mara, but we feel the relief of her touch, of the soft wave of her words that Stokes washes over us in the sigh of the chorus.“17” leaves us with the question, do you really want that or were you told to be someone else at seventeen? It's a proper cliff hanger to represent the introspection of Catching Rabbits, closing out the EP with the distant sound of water lapping at a shore.

Listen to Catching Rabbits below: