Mike Kota is no newcomer. Her first EP, Rift, was released in 2021, several months after The Current first covered her. She played at First Avenue’s Best New Bands show in 2023. Hell, she’s opened for Hozier.
And Kota’s style was there from the start: She sings in a husky voice over her own electric guitar work, a mix of arpeggios and other reverberating figures that repeat and mutate, pulsing like the circulatory system of these songs. Kota is, you might say, a known quantity.
Still, with each new release, Kota somehow sounds even more like herself. This summer, she released Through Fire, a six-song EP produced by her old friend Henry Breen. And it’s the most Mike Kota of her collections yet.
The EP opens with a blast of guitar that’s loud and dissonant but emotionally tangled underneath, less a shout of “here I am” than a splash of paint on the canvas that will soon be arranged into something more structured.
“It doesn’t mean that you got away with it/It doesn’t mean that I’m OK with it,” Kota sings on the opening track, “Swimming Toward That Something Shining,” setting the tone for the album. There are breakup songs maybe, possibly even songs of betrayal.
Kota’s lyrics steer clear of poeticism in favor of directness. Lines like “I trusted/I trusted you” and “You fucked up/Yeah, you fucked up” don't need to be prettified, and sometimes a title like “There’s Still Blood” says it all.
A rhythm section supports Kota unobtrusively, with her guitar and voice exclusively commanding the foreground. Through Fire is the work of an artist who’s fully realized what she’s about. But we’ve thought that about Mike Kota before.
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