It’s been a bit since we’ve heard from Anika Pyle. The former leader of Chumped and Katie Ellen released their debut solo album Wild River in 2021, and since then Pyle moved away from the Northeast and back home to Colorado.

“In May of 2022, I left for my first solo tour to promote Wild River, my debut LP reflecting on losing my father to opioid overdose in 2019,” Pyle explained in a statement. “Halfway through the tour I received news that my mother had been airlifted to the ICU and put on a ventilator with post-COVID complications. I left the tour and flew back to Colorado to care for her, and I’ve been here ever since.”

Today, Pyle is announcing a new EP called Four Corners, recorded before the move back home but inspired by the area they grew up in, with each song about a different state in the Four Corners. Lead single “Arizona” is a rousing, aching song about heartbreak: “Where did the love go, baby, did we leave it in Arizona?” Pyle sings in the chorus. “Where did the love go, baby, can’t accept that this is over.”

Pyle said:

The opening song, “Arizona,” is a contemplation on my first trip to the Grand Canyon. I was on tour in my old band Chumped, on the road with Jeff Rosenstock, and experiencing the slow dissolution of my first love, an 11-year relationship with my high school sweetheart and then bandmate. Staring out at the canyon, I felt that devastating mix of possibility and pain. I knew that ending our relationship was the only way to become truly myself, but I knew that kind of expansion would require an intense amount of heartache and the slow erosion of who I thought I was.

Listen below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Arizona”
02 “Diné Utah Homecoming Queen”
03 “New Mexican Blues”
04 “Colorado Sage”

The Four Corners EP is out 2/2.