First Time / Alone, Greg Mendez’s new EP and first release with Dead Oceans, came together in late summer and early fall of 2023; the songs here appear in the order in which they were written, recorded straight to four-track in the small spare room of his West Philadelphia apartment. It’s a four song arc, a spectral passageway, one brief and fluid body of work that hangs together from the mournful opening of “Mountain Dew Hell” to the pitched-up vocals on “Pain Meds,” a tiny song floundering in the enormity of grief. The experience of listening through is like waking up from a half-remembered dream, a shadow in the corner of the room, a strange solitude, a temporal New York autumn with gray skies and naked trees. But while the release is sparse and spontaneous, it’s tactile and consuming, a glimpse into the beautiful, lonely worlds that live in the core of a Greg Mendez song.First Time / Alone is the inverse of his 2023 self-titled album, a meticulous and labored-over collection of songs that went on to become a surprise slowburn success. Mendez has released music in various capacities across 15 years living in Philadelphia and New York, but the self-titled was what propelled him to a wider attention, a critical breakthrough on best-of lists from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Paste, and more. That forward momentum came to a quick halt following an intensive surgery on his right wrist in the summer of 2023 – a four-month purgatory of bad TV, canceled touring, and physical therapy ensued, a painful stretch of boredom leaving Mendez unable to play guitar.“Mountain Dew Hell” and “First Time,” the funereal A-side of the EP, are time capsules of that fever-dream. There’s something almost sacred in the weary bleating of the electric organ, Mendez’s left hand plucking out the chords, lonesome and unadorned. And “Alone” was the first song Mendez wrote once he was able to play guitar again. Likely none of the songs would have existed as-is if Mendez’s right hand hadn’t been out of commission, but they’re artful in their directness and simplicity. He initially thought he would need to refine them, building them out to the same scale as self-titled, but the more he returned to the work, the more it felt complete and true as-is.There is a distinctly handmade feeling to every aspect of Mendez’s world. On the First Time / Alone cover is a collection of stars found in a friend’s sketchbook, then colored in by Mendez with oil pastels – each stroke feels heavy, straining off the page, alive with a human touch. The same could be said for the cover of self-titled, a color pencil illustration of a forlorn mother Mary drawn by Mendez and his wife and bandmate, Veronica; in the portrait her massive eyes are turned upwards, hand outstretched, grace either offered or taken away.Mendez is an intuitive songwriter, melodies channeled through ether, a storyteller who across his catalog has chronicled vivid violence and instability – a wallet chain to the head, a crack house arrest, the misdeeds from addiction that hang around like a ghost of past lives – but it’s threaded together with love songs, too, with odes to friendship, true dedication, the things that can buoy one through the worst. Mendez has a habit of noticing those things, of finding the light, exacting poetry from even the bleakest, shit-caked situations. In his songs there is an innate ability to balance grit with gentleness, cruelties rewritten through preternatural sweetness, a heart thrumming unendingly, confidently, through the dark.
