Back with their third EP, midwestern haikus, tenmonthsummer is getting a little quieter this time around, choosing to strip down their sound to delicate acoustic guitars, intimate vocals and a simple question: "Can I bloom?" The lakeshore emo band from Chicago, IL is out here plucking banjo AND heart strings.
midwestern haikus
"midwestern haikus" does not introduce tenmonthsummer with a loud declaration, instead it asks a quiet question: "Can I bloom?" The question keeps returning until it feels less like someone refraining and more like something the narrator is trying to keep convincing themselves is possible. Moving through parents leaving "a country underwater," humming Midwest powerlines, cicadas (which are a sound-producing insect, if you didn't know like myself), fireflies and warm rain; the writing treats home as something inherited but never truly understood. The music follows that same train of thought, beginning restrained before gradually swelling up around the vocals, only to pull itself back again. "Verse chorus verse chorus 5-7-5, all my poetics are tangential" feels like more of a confession than just simple lyrics: these Midwestern haikus were never meant to stay neat when the life inside them refuses to fit into seventeen syllables.
Somewhere between kissing beside the marigolds, writing poems beneath a tree and staring into a shower fogged mirror, "Can I bloom?" stops sounding like a pretty metaphor and starts to feel more literal. The music grows and retreats around each memory as if the narrator is working up the courage to answer their own question, but they never quite manage to figure it out. "midwestern haikus" doesn't know whether leaving, changing and growing are the same thing, or whether you can ever completely escape where you were planted in the first place.
listening to kerosene heights makes me want to be a better person
There's a particular kind of tired where even admitting you need to get your shit together feels like just another endless task to tick off your to-do list; "listening to kerosene heights makes me want to be a better person" takes that feeling and lives within it. The opening banjo of this song feels almost too casual beneath "It's been a long day, It's been a long night" before it pushes forward to fill the space around the vocals. Long days become long nights, then a long year eventually becomes a whole long life; grabbing beers and cutting up limes feels like a tiny distraction when you know that there's a larger-than-life conversation waiting to happen. "I've got some work I need to do on myself," shows that there's nowhere left for the narrator to hide; they know deep down they need to be better.
The Kerosene Heights reference goes deeper than a ridiculously emo song title, with tenmonthsummer borrowing lines and melodies from their song "Perfect Timing," weaving them into their own crisis. By borrowing, they make the influence seem almost conversational, like they've had the song playing for so long, enough of it has started to bleed into the narrator's own thoughts. Those familiar melodies are given new context around "I'm sorry I'm like this, I'm tryna get right," turning admiration for another band in the same scene into an uncomfortable bit of self-reflection. By the time the song circles back to "I'm the only one that's putting you through hell," the title suddenly feels pretty literal; Kerosene Heights provided some words and melodies, but tenmonthsummer are using them to figure out what the hell to do with themselves.
yearn
"yearn" sounds like tenmonthsummer taking every complicated feeling from the opening tracks and deciding, for at least a few minutes, to be deeply and unashamedly sincere about them. "I'll yearn for yourself, if you'd like that from me" is not the smoothest declaration of love ever written, but it works without coming off cheesy because it's honest. The narrator is tripping over their own devotion, offering to yearn, burn and learn for somebody before they've ever figured out what that person wants and needs from them. The guitars carry a warm glowing quality under the vocals before gradually opening up around "the stars could not comprehend light this glowing," turning what begins as a quiet promise into something almost cosmically dramatic. Then "how could you know, how deep this goes?" arrives and suddenly all that brightness feels less confident.
The music swells, softens and returns with more weight, making the second half feel like the narrator repeating themselves because the first attempt just wasn't enough. "Flowers bloom and burst, in a dance rehearsed" brings the blooming imagery of "midwestern haikus" back, except this time growth is being shaped around someone else. There's something beautiful about promising to yearn across "all realities," but also something quite terrifying about offering to change yourself depending on what the other person needs. "yearn" lives in that uncomfortable middle ground between loving someone and slowly losing yourself in that love.
huji
Clean, gently picked guitars and close vocals give "Let me take a photo, let me take it slow" the softness of someone trying not to disturb the moment they're capturing, yet almost immediately the image starts falling apart. Shades have faded, colors are "not so true" and the narrator needs "a filtered frame" to capture the world as they actually see it. As the guitars gradually widen around the vocals, the distortion starts to feel like an aesthetic choice and more like something that is needed; maybe reality is just a little easier to look at once you've messed with the exposure a little.
The narrator makes it clear that one person can take up quite a lot of space when you're obsessed with them. "My entire imagination" probably could have been enough, but tenmonthsummer go one further and make them "every constellation" too, while the layered guitars give each repetition a higher, more expansive glow. There's something sweet about that exaggeration, but there's also something that doesn't quite match the uncertainty of everything before it. "huji" isn't about being interested in capturing the person they are on paper but about the person you've built up so much in your mind that you can't help but have them at the center of your universe.
sinew & tendon
"sinew & tendon" is interested in all the little details you notice when somebody is so close, you're almost one person. The recurring "where does my skin end? Where does yours begin?" sets the tone, while fingers against the nape of a neck, the curve of a back and the heat of the mattress make the song feel almost entirely built around physical touch. Beneath it, tightly woven guitars and light vocals keep everything feeling small and personal, never breaking the spell that the narrator has created with their love. There's no loud declaration of love here; the narrator seems far more interested in learning the other person through all the tiny details that others often wouldn't think to remember.
The cosmic imagery that has followed tenmonthsummer through the EP comes back around through the lines "I'm tracing your signs, and kissing your scars." It's a beautiful image that's given a restless edge with the following line, "I'm counting your breaths, so desperate and stark," almost as if the narrator already knows this moment won't last forever. "Not even God knows what we do in the dark" feels less concerned with secrecy than creating a tiny world that just belongs to them and them alone.
a question only you can answer (bloom)
Sometimes one question is enough to fill an entire song. "a question only you can answer (bloom)" has only three words to work with, "Can I bloom?", but tenmonthsummer have spent the rest of the EP giving those three words enough baggage that nothing else is needed. Instead of the solitary questioning heard at the beginning of "midwestern haikus," the line is now sung in a group harmony, voices joining and overlapping as the arrangement slowly gathers around them. Hearing the question come from several people at once makes it feel bigger without bringing it any closer to the answer. "Can I bloom?" has gone from something quietly personal to something that everyone is seemingly still trying to figure out.
That shared harmony is what allows such a simple closing track to hold so much weight. Every return to "Can I bloom?" feels connected to something that the EP has already explored: changing for another person, losing yourself in yearning and wondering whether intimacy can help you grow or simply reshape you. By stripping back everything to one repeated thought, "a question only you can answer (bloom)" refuses to turn any of those feelings into a near conclusion.
tenmonthsummer end exactly where they began the EP, asking the same question but after everything in between, it somehow doesn't feel like that same question from the start. Whether that means that something has finally started to bloom, or whether they're still figuring out, is left somewhere in the silence that follows.
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