Ellum – Deciduous EP Review

Every now and then a release arrives in my inbox that feels like it already knows what I like to listen to. It doesn’t shout. Deciduous, the debut EP from Austin-based singer-songwriter Paige Morton aka Ellum, is exactly that kind of record. A quiet stunner. A bruised and beautiful hybrid of indie rock, shoegaze, slowcore and post-hardcore. It doesn’t chase genre—it kinda just bleeds through them.

Ellum, still cloaked in a bit of mystery, wears influence like a second skin. The palette is fascinating: the emotional turbulence of Converge, the bare fragility of Nick Drake, the noir elegance of Interpol—all running like veins through this deeply personal and richly textured six-track release. Production duties come courtesy of Carson Pace of The Callous Daoboys, a pairing that makes perfect sense once you hear the results. These songs ache in unexpected directions. And the further you go in, the harder they hit.

Let’s dive into it.

The EP opens with the bittersweet ‘Macy’, a song of two halves. It begins with disarming simplicity: a single, gently strummed guitar lays the foundation, wide open and raw, while Morton’s voice—delicate, exposed—trickles in like the ghost of an apology. There’s a deep sense of stillness in this first section, but it’s not peaceful. It’s the kind of quiet that trembles with tension, as though the track is waiting for something to break. And then, without warning, the second half crashes in. A sudden swell of fuzzed-out guitars and reverb-heavy distortion flips the emotional tone completely. This isn’t a slow build or a gentle shift—it’s a rupture. The track lurches from introspective singer-songwriter territory into full-blown shoegaze melancholy, guitars howling like they’re trying to outrun the weight of the words just sung. It’s cathartic but never messy—each layer of sound precisely placed to elevate the emotional stakes.

Up next, ‘Deciduous’ slips into something more fragile, more haunted. After the emotional rupture of ‘Macy’, this track feels like stepping through the smouldering wreckage. The guitars are cleaner here, bathed in chorus and delay—a glistening shoegaze shimmer that calls to mindthe more subdued corners of Whirr’s catalogue. But unlike their sprawling soundscapes, Ellum keeps things close and compressed. Everything here feels deliberate, tight, wound like a spring. Lyrically, the song plays like a quiet unravelling. The title itself—Deciduous—evokes ideas of shedding, of letting go as a seasonal necessity. There’s a suggestion of growth through loss, but also a fear of what remains after the fall. The emotional restraint is chilling—this isn’t melodrama, it’s the real thing. One of the standout features here is the way the instrumentation mirrors that emotional unease. Guitar’s chime and quiver, notes occasionally bending out of key, like nerves fraying at the edge. There’s a sense that everything might fall apart if held too tightly—and that tension gives the song a heartbreaking edge.

That quiet-then-profoundly-loud format continues into ‘Papercuts’, but here it’s distilled into its sharpest, most urgent form. This is the shortest track on the EP, but don’t let the runtime fool you—’Papercuts’ stings. It arrives like a whisper and leaves a bruise. The intro is skeletal—barely there. Morton’s voice comes in low and close, almost conspiratorial, riding a single repetitive guitar phrase that feels like it might vanish if you blink too hard. But it’s the restraint that’s so unnerving. You can hear the song tightening its grip from the first bar. And when it goes off, it really goes off. Guitars explode into the foreground in great shuddering waves, distorted just enough to give the edges that satisfying blur. The shift isn’t just dynamic—it’s physical. Your chest tightens. It’s the sonic equivalent of a paper cut: small, sudden, deceptively deep.

‘Easy’ arrives almost fully formed. There’s no coy build-up, no tentative lean-in—it kicks the door open with purpose. Drums pound with ritualistic insistence over a sublime, slow-burning chord progression that feels both familiar and otherworldly. Right from the off, there’s a gravity to it. The chord changes unfold patiently giving the song a grounded, almost meditative weight. As the bass slides in beneath the surface and harmony vocals begin to bloom around Morton’s lead, the track settles into a kind of hypnotic, head-nodding pulse. The arrangement breathes; it trusts the listener to sit inside the pocket, to feel the weight of each pause and swell. It’s a reminder that ease doesn’t mean absence of struggle, but maybe, just maybe, the ability to move through it with grace.

We settle back into that peaceful insistence of guitar and voice on ‘Sick’. It’s a gentle return to Ellum’s core sonic motif—Morton’s voice, calm but cracked around the edges, floating over cyclical guitar patterns that seem to breathe in and out. There’s a deceptive stillness here, like the kind that lingers just before a fever breaks. The title suggests discomfort, but what we get is something more quietly unsettling: exhaustion, perhaps, or the strange calm that comes from surrendering to what you can’t control. There’s a tension just under the surface, a kind of emotional drone that never resolves. The bass pulses like a second heartbeat and pared back drum pattern gives the track a sense of space and unease. The mix leaves just enough room for silence to become a character—one that presses in between each phrase, demanding to be felt. ‘Sick’ is a slow burn, a quietly devastating track that doesn’t demand attention but absolutely rewards it.

The closer is Morton at her most vulnerable. ‘Moonlight’ strips things down again—warm, lo-fi textures but with a vocal that’s in control and leading the song. It’s intimate and spectral, with the feel of a demo that was too pure to overwork. There’s a quiet confidence in the delivery, like she knows exactly where she’s taking us, even if we’re drifting through fog. From the outset, there’s a dreamlike stillness to the track. The guitar is hushed, slightly detuned, almost feeling like it’s been recorded to cassette—warped around the edges in that beautiful way where tone becomes texture. But instead of crumbling under its own fragility, the song holds its shape. Morton’s voice does the heavy lifting here, clear and grounded, threading purposefully through the mist. That shoegaze shimmer is dialled right back, but the influence is still there—in the reverb-drenched guitar tails, in the way the chords seem to hover rather than land. As the song begins to dissolve, there’s no grand finale. Just a slow fade, as if she’s walking out of frame, still singing. No resolution. No punctuation mark. It ends the way real emotion often does: mid-thought, still reverberating.

Deciduous is a stunning debut—not just for what it does, but for what it doesn’t do. It refuses to settle. It holds space for vulnerability without demanding resolution. These songs feel lived in and raw, like pages torn from an overstuffed journal. There’s an emotional precision here that makes each track land differently depending on when and how you hear it. Across six tracks, Ellum delivers a stunningly cohesive debut that feels like it was grown rather than written—rooted in emotional honesty and nurtured by a melting pot of influences that never overwhelm her own voice. Morton strips her sound back without ever losing complexity; every layer feels intentional, every moment of quiet carries as much weight as the loudest passages. Morton has built something special here. The leaves are falling, but spring is already humming underneath.

Deciduous is out now and available over on the Ellum Bandcamp Page.

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