'First Time / Alone' is the inverse of his 2023 self-titled album, a meticulous and labored-over collection of songs that went on to become a surprise slowburn success. Mendez has released music in various capacities across 15 years living in Philadelphia and New York, but the self-titled was what propelled him to a wider attention, a critical breakthrough on best-of lists from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Paste, and more. That forward momentum came to a quick halt following an intensive surgery on his right wrist in the summer of 2023 – a four-month purgatory of bad TV, canceled touring, and physical therapy ensued, a painful stretch of boredom leaving Mendez unable to play guitar. 'Mountain Dew Hell' and 'First Time', the funereal A-side of the EP, are time capsules of that fever-dream; 'Alone' was the first song Mendez wrote once he was able to play guitar again. Likely none of the songs would have existed as-is if Mendez’s right hand hadn’t been out of commission, but they’re artful in their directness and simplicity. He initially thought he would need to refine them, building them out to the same scale as self-titled, but the more he returned to the work, the more it felt complete and true as-is.
Mendez is an intuitive songwriter, melodies channeled through ether, a storyteller who across his catalog has chronicled vivid violence and instability – a wallet chain to the head, a crack house arrest, the misdeeds from addiction that hang around like a ghost of past lives – but it’s threaded together with love songs, too, with odes to friendship, true dedication, the things that can buoy one through the worst. Mendez has a habit of noticing those things, of finding the light, exacting poetry from even the bleakest, shit-caked situations. In his songs there is an innate ability to balance grit with gentleness, cruelties rewritten through preternatural sweetness, a heart thrumming unendingly, confidently, through the dark.
TRACK LISTING
1. Mountain Dew Hell
2. First Time
3. Alone
4. Pain Meds