Set for release on September 5, 2025, “Seismic” marks the solo debut of American singer-songwriter and guitarist David Bayless—now based in Zürich, Switzerland—after years of work in bands including Via Fucina, Colossal Rex, and Arune. Written and recorded in his Zürich apartment between autumn 2024 and spring 2025, the five-song EP takes a deliberately austere approach: layered fingerpicked acoustic guitar, quiet double-tracked vocals, and the occasional brush of melodica, mellotron, or drums. The restraint isn’t an affectation; it’s the artifact of reality—late-night sessions in a shared space—that ultimately serves the songs, giving them breath and a lived-in intimacy.
Bayless’s writing sits in the seam between confession and surrealism. Across “Seismic,” he returns to themes of collapse, identity, inertia, and quiet resistance, letting small images do the heavy lifting. The title track sets the tone, mapping emotional aftershocks in measured phrases and measured time. “Arachnid” renders two ill-fated figures caught in a web—less thriller than parable—its harmonies tightening and slackening like threads in wind. “Exoskeleton” turns its critique inward, examining ambition and self-construction—the way we “wear what we want to become until it wears us”—over a pulse that never quite resolves. “Icarus” and “Husk” complete the sequence, their titles alone suggesting shedding, risk, and the forms we leave behind, even as the arrangements stay spare enough to leave room for the listener’s own projections.
What emerges is a portrait of an artist committed to songwriting as close observation. Bayless favors clarity over clamor: guitar parts interlock softly, melodies move by inches rather than leaps, and vocals sit unforced, often doubled in a narrow band that feels like a thought spoken twice. When color enters—an air-reed wheeze from melodica, a ghostly smear of mellotron, a minimalist drum figure—it does so with intent, widening the frame without crowding it. The result is an EP that reads as a single conversation carried across five rooms: not loud, but steady; not ornate, but exact.
“Seismic” also reflects Bayless’s path. Raised in a small mountain town in Northern California, he studied guitar at the Hochschule der Künste Bern before settling in Zürich, where he has been an active collaborator and bandmate. The solo work narrows the aperture. By recording at home—late, quietly, within constraint—Bayless lets necessity shape aesthetics. You can hear the rooms in these songs: the careful gain staging, the soft attack of right hand on strings, the sense that every overdub had to earn its place. That economy gives the EP its backbone.
Tracklist
Seismic
Arachnid
Icarus
Exoskeleton
Husk
Physical media will be available in a limited run of 100 CDs, a tangible counterpart to a project built on small choices and close listening. For listeners drawn to lyric-forward writing, intimate dynamics, and songs that leave space for meaning to arrive on its own, “Seismic” promises a quiet but lasting impact when it arrives on September 5.
