Save the date for November 30, 2025 for SYCAMORE AIRPLANES Listening & Tea Party!
Potion presents their new EP, Sycamore Airplanes, a soft art rock collection of musical stories. With thought-provoking lyrics, lush, layered harmonies, and gorgeous vocal choruses, this collection of songs is like a 15-minute meditation, or an antidote for anxiety. It doesn’t tell you to forget that things are still bad, but offers a safe space for you to take time out to regroup before facing life’s challenges again. Consider it a little breather to lower your heart rate, gather your thoughts, and refocus to get back in the fight.
The themes of these songs are centered on our relationships with ourselves, each other, and society, observing the dynamics, struggles, and fissures in the connections we hold most dear, in the hope of better understanding. It’s simultaneously haunting and wistful, as well as hopeful and magical.
The EP opens with “Dark Matter,” an artsy, soft pop track ripe with flavor and spirit. In their signature style of multilayered melodies, the bass sings its own song between the energetic guitar hooks and a prism of vocal layers, reminiscent of movie soundtracks from the 70s. Annie’s warm and charismatic voice serves as a consistent tether through the unexpected turns of the song, blending effortlessly with this art rock/ dream-pop style.
From the first measures of “Orchids & Roses,” you are immersed in a grand and timeless soundscape, reminiscent of a mantra meditation. The acoustic guitar riff is circling, floating over the droning synth, lifting the curtain for Annie’s stories. In this song of hopes and expectations of human migration, from generation to generation, there is also a song of disappointment and loss. The quiet movements before the cascading sounds and crescendo of back vocals reveal the vast, emotive scenery where the song dwells.
The closing song, “Carnet de Bal,” also carries that reoccurring theme of nostalgia and forgotten dreams and time where stories and melodies could compare to an impressionist painting (or Sir John Everett Millais’s pre-Raphaelite painting, Ophelia) in which you will dive into a pond filled with melodious guitar strokes, layered voices and aqueous synths.
Spend some time getting to know Potion again with Sycamore Airplanes and you will find yourself in another sphere of emotion. All the melodies are memorable and artfully performed, revealing a panorama of mental pictures, gently leading you through a sensation of internal struggle, a mourning of something you’ve lost or you can never have.