Last Relapse End 13-Year Hiatus With Self-Titled EP
(City Bird) For the first time in over a decade, Atlanta-raised indie rock band Last Relapse has reopened a chapter many assumed was quietly buried. Their self-titled EP does not arrive as a nostalgic victory lap or a dusty archival release. Instead, it feels like the sound of unfinished business finally catching up to the present, reshaped by time, distance, and the slow erosion that only real life can provide.
During their initial run from 2006 to 2012, Last Relapse cultivated a devoted regional audience with a sound that balanced raw confession and expansive, dream-hazed guitar work. Their live shows were immersive and unpredictable, veering between hushed vulnerability and explosive release. They played more than 200 shows across the Southeast and left behind the underground favorite Machine before dissolving into separate lives, cities, and responsibilities. What lingered, quietly and persistently, was the music.
The band's return feels neither accidental nor forced. It is deliberate, patient, and deeply felt. Frontman David Holding articulates the emotional gravity behind the project:
"We came back to these songs because they never stopped tapping us on the shoulder-they kept looping in our heads. We kept the takes that felt alive, leaning into feel over perfection because that's how our band breathes. Some of these unfinished songs lived on hard drives for more than a decade, and finishing them felt like letting a few ghosts go. Most we played at shows many times even, so completing them now felt like picking up a conversation mid-sentence. This release works towards closing a loop while opening a new one. It isn't about nostalgia; it's proof the connection never left-so if you hear urgency and relief, that's exactly where we are."
That urgency is palpable throughout the EP. These tracks carry the emotional DNA of the band's earlier work, yet they unfold with a clarity and restraint that only years of lived experience can bring. The production favors atmosphere over gloss, grit over perfection, allowing imperfections to remain as evidence of breath, movement, and memory. There is a quiet confidence here that never tries to outrun its own vulnerability.
While echoes of Manchester Orchestra, Modest Mouse, Deerhunter, and Bright Eyes are detectable in the band's sonic palette, Last Relapse never feels derivative. Instead, those influences function as emotional reference points rather than templates. The EP blends the bruised urgency of the Atlanta scene with the softer, salt-stung haze of Tampa, resulting in a sound that feels both anchored and adrift, familiar and strangely renewed.
The thirteen-year absence adds weight to every note. In that time, the members became different people, carrying new histories into old songs. What once felt like sketches or fragments now sound like messages resolved. The music no longer belongs solely to a specific moment or era. It exists in the in-between, where memory and present urgency blur.
This self-titled release does not read as a reboot. It feels like a continuation long delayed but never abandoned. There is no performative nostalgia here, no attempt to recreate a former version of themselves. Instead, Last Relapse allows their evolution to remain visible, even raw.
For listeners drawn to the emotional swell of Band of Horses, the theatrical introspection of Circa Survive, the restless energy of Cage the Elephant, or the melodic melancholy of The Format, this EP offers a familiar gravity with new emotional contours.
Last Relapse has not returned to freeze time. They have returned to move forward - to close one loop and, quietly, begin another. Their self-titled EP arrives this fall not as a memory revived, but as a living, breathing continuation of a story that never truly ended. Stream the EP here
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