Kat Koan writes like someone who’s spent years framing emotion for the camera. Before music, she worked in TV, building scenes and mood, and you can hear that in everything she does. Her projects jump between electroclash, rock, and pop, but the core stays the same: tension, release, intimacy, unease. She’s worked with Grammy-winning producer Ainsley Adams, and Dean Hurley, known for his work with David Lynch, mixed her debut album. That tells you where her ear sits: cinematic first, genre second. The Tides Will Turn is the clearest version of that so far. It sounds built for picture.
The opener, “Tall,” comes in quiet: voice and piano, steady and close. The pacing is unhurried. Light percussion slides in without pushing the song out of orbit, and by the time the pads and cymbals show up, the track has the weight of a closing-scene monologue. It’s reflective without going soft, and it feels scored, not just arranged.
“No One Compares to You” leans more on groove. There’s a trip-hop tint to the rhythm, piano anchoring the progression, and a vocal that sits right on the line between direct and confessional. It feels like late-night city light, not club energy, more walking than dancing.
“How Much Longer” bends toward something more whimsical. The chorus has a childlike lilt, almost lullaby phrasing, but the production underneath still feels widescreen. It’s the kind of contrast you’d hear over a memory sequence in a drama or animated feature, sweet on the surface with something unsettled underneath.
Across the whole EP, Koan keeps the mood focused: warm tones, slow tempo, forward vocal, everything wrapped in that “end of the episode” feeling. “Where Does The Love Go,” “Free Fall,” and “Sleep On It” carry that same sense of motion through uncertainty, like characters processing impact in real time instead of triumphing over it. Nothing here is built like a radio single; it’s built like scenes.
The Tides Will Turn doesn’t feel like a collection of songs thrown together. It moves like story. You could drop any of these tracks under a coming-of-age moment, a goodbye at dawn, a holding-it-together speech after the damage. It’s not anime in sound, but it has that adventure arc energy, that sense of standing on the edge of something and knowing the next step changes everything.
Koan isn’t just writing songs. She’s clearly already thinking in shots, edits, cuts. This EP is basically proof of concept for film and series work: emotional, paced, and visual even without a screen.
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