Victoria Sol’s “EP 1” Is What Happens When Feeling Refuses to Be Simplified
Victoria Sol, a Cuban-American artist, carries grief in her music the way some people carry it in silence. She lost her brother in 2015, a cousin in 2016, and another cousin who was like a brother in 2021. Those losses did not leave her. They settled, slowly, into what would become her debut EP, “EP 1.”
The songs on “EP 1” are heavy but not crushing. Grief moves through them, and so does climate anxiety, that ambient dread that hums beneath daily life for so many of her generation. Questions about belonging rise and fall across the record, never quite resolving, never quite letting go. And threaded through it all is something more intimate and more uncomfortable, the particular confusion of wanting someone you know you shouldn’t want.
She does not tidy any of it up. She lets the feelings stay tangled, which is the most honest thing a songwriter can do.
Just when you feel invested, she throws a curveball with “diggers den.” It’s baroque, melancholic, and cinematic. Digital flourishes flutter around her vocals like silicon-rendered fairies tending to someone in a 64-bit forest.
By now, her sound has established its pedigree. Bedroom pop comes through clearly. So do early 2000s electro elements and digital-era aesthetics. “ascent” condenses all of that into its purest form. The song builds into a thick blanket of sound, almost a textured cacophony that speaks to too many moods and movements to classify. It’s a feast.
“EP 1” arrives as a debut that doesn’t behave like one. Victoria Sol lost people she loved, walked away from a funded graduate program, and spent pandemic isolation teaching herself how to build songs from scratch. The result is a set of tracks that hold real grief, real anxiety, and real questions about belonging. None of it gets dressed up or explained away. If you listen, you’ll hear someone processing things as they are and might even find yourself doing the same thing.