The best origin stories have a constraint in them: a borrowed four track, a garage with no heating, a ban on guitars. We Spoke in Headphones got theirs in the name. A few years back in an apartment (the precise circumstances of which the press notes are very carefully and discreetly avoiding) three people started making music in a situation where everyone was wearing headphones so nothing was actually heard in the room other than whispers. Loops and spoken word came out of it as a direct result of the fact that you can’t be loud when you’re wearing headphones.

That’s a really nice way to start a band and a very risky way to make a record as the early sessions were only successful because no one else was supposed to hear them. Talking Always (five tracks released today on Far Above See Level) is what happens when you take that bet and put it out there.

The EP is in the inbetween zone of indietronica and the more loosely defined “experimental” area the label sits in, and it maintains a very strong sense of song structure (which I’d certainly count as a positive). The production is very much on the side of what most producers would call “the rough edges” with repetitions, small imperfections and silences that are long enough to make you look at your player. The press release talks of two vocal presences that overlap, respond to each other and at times contradict, and I normally hit the mute button when a release has that “internal dialogue” thing going on. In this case it works. The voices are less so one lead and one backing than two roommates talking across a dark apartment, one of them simply not quite ready to be heard.

Away opens in the dark, it’s half ambient, half film score, built around a vocal that just holds each note a beat longer than is comfortable (as if it’s checking whether the room will allow it). It’s at 3:36 that it really never moves and it does a very good job in that it tells you the temperature of the next thirteen minutes. It also raises a problem which the EP never really resolves, which is that nothing after it gets much brighter at all.

Falling Down pulls the fog in even closer. It’s a ballad in the way a glacier is a river; it’s slow, it’s heavy, it’s technically moving. The guitars come in wrapped in echo and just stay there. The vocal goes into the echo rather than riding on top of it. That’s the point where the two instincts of the EP (the song shaped one and the atmosphere shaped one) converge and it’s also the song the label have decided to turn into a film. That film (the first of a planned series of five films made with generative AI models) is a rather grim animated fairy tale about Hugo, a stray cat who’s been left to recover in an abandoned farmhouse full of ferals. The press materials state that this is a story based on real events. I have the usual reservations about machine generated imagery and about the notion of it being “part of the work’s discourse”. This particular song doesn’t need any such justification though and a stray cat in recovery is a fairly appropriate subject for music that moves so slowly.

Ill Sound is the bit where the record goes all weird, in the quietest way. At 3:08 it’s the most experimental thing on the record really, the loops stop supporting the song and start to argue with it. The two voices are arguing far more than they are agreeing. It’s going to be a photorealistic sci-fi short in 2027, an intergenerational journey through deep space designed to induce a sense of vertigo (a rather ambitious proposition for three minutes). You can definitely hear the dizziness, I’m not so sure you can hear the spaceship.

Undercover is the shortest track at 2:49 and the most vivacious in the way of a person strolling down a hospital corridor (it’s got a real pulse, it’s got a real sense of movement). For a moment you think the record is going to open a window. It doesn’t. Once the groove has settled it’s pretty much indistinguishable from the other tracks in the record, same colour scheme, same hush, same voices all pointing in the same middle distance. The film that was intended for it (a psychological short on adult identity and the inner child, with all the attendant compulsions, roles and carefully constructed appearances) is due by the end of the year and may be the thing that actually sets it apart.

Leaving You closes the EP and is probably the most accessible track on it, the most commercially viable I’d say. It has a real mainstream sheen which would fit perfectly on a playlist of the big budget acts. What’s interesting is just how little the band have had to change to achieve that. It’s not a softening of the style or a translation into something more palatable. It’s the same restraint, it’s the same two voices just in a format that would sit on a radio playlist. That’s actually quite a feat and I’d rather hear this than a desperate attempt at crossover which would have required a complete abandonment of the apartment.

Over 16 minutes and 49 seconds Talking Always maintains a single mood almost without a break and that’s both its achievement and its limitation. The coherence the press release is so keen to point to is absolutely there. So is the sameness and by the fourth track I was wishing one song would just go and be wrong. The premise still holds though. You can hear people who learned to listen to each other before they learned how to perform. That’s rarer than a good hook. Obviously put on your headphones.