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Photo: Shy Louise

I woke up this morning elated and for good reason, one of my favorite artists, the considerate poet SEB, dropped a beautiful EP titled we were so beautiful. I can’t lie, it feels like Christmas. I needed this catharsis.

Speaking on the project, the LA-based artist shares, "When I was making this project, I started to find a lot of inspiration through fiction." There is definitely a cinematic quality to each track. In terms of the production, we were so beautiful is a smorgasbord of summertime sonics. SEB’s songwriting possesses a particular level of zen wisdom, which makes sense given his nomadic lifestyle, transiently bouncing from New York, Haiti, Oklahoma, and Miami before making the move to LA to focus on his music career.

The lead single "loving u is harder" sets the tone and invites you as you are into SEB’s headspace. Manifesting in various instances throughout the project is SEB’s unique, carefree demeanor as if happiness is simultaneously unattainable yet just an arm's length away. also features a criminally underrated and aesthetically-dope music video. This theme segues flawlessly into “i saw u leave”, which sounds like an opiate-induced fever dream, interspersed with some super tasteful trap sections.

"sugarhoneyiceicetea" also explicitly deserves its own bouquet of flowers. SEB does a flawless job constructing an odyssey of a song from a simple phrase. “You always hold me down, but now why you on top of me,” he coos. The second half of the record is where SEB truly flies, transitioning into a jazz-swing segment that sounds like it could be a descendant of Erykah Badu’s magnum opus "Mama’s Gun."

With "moving on," SEB unpacks a carousel of honest emotions to a love that was lost. The record also features what is unequivocally one of my favorite bars of the year in, “That's why I keep two phones, shorty; one for love, one for the money”. It takes a special artist to be able to wear his heart on his sleeve while unflinchingly maintaining a Miles Davis level of cool throughout the process. Then there is the slam dunk, alley-oop feature from Khary. Truth be told, the pairing goes together like PB&J. Frankly, chemistry like that is special. “Maybe I'm talking too much and there's simply nothing I can say / I would rather be the one that you lost than the one in your way, yeah” Khary spits, before passing the rock back to SEB.

A beautiful hat tip to the genre of house, “home2u” arrives as a personal favorite. I’m a sucker for music that puts you in your feels. In my mind, this track is sheer perfection. It feels like a drunken night's culmination, watching the street lights illuminate your journey back home from the backseat of an Uber. To close out this wonderful EP, SEB inoculates us with a bevy of intimate and proverbial musings with “i made mistakes.”

Simply put, we were so young is ambitious as it is calculated and guaranteed to boost the number of churchgoers who proselytize the book of SEB. 

Listen to we were so beautiful below: