San Francisco is a city that can comfortably be called “idyllic.” On rare days when skies are clear it’s impossible to forget that Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart In San Francisco” exists for a reason. These are the days that post-punk music diametrically opposes the landscape, when it’s okay to succumb to Bay Area stereotypes by listening to jam bands in order to avoid any gothic echo that might remind you that the crystalline weather won’t last. Creative Adult’s new EP Ring Around The Room stands in for the rest of the days of the year, when the fog is so thick that it dampens your hair and makes the air smell like Pacific brine, the days when that Mark Twain quote (“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”) is almost annoyingly accurate.

Creative Adult’s dusky new EP parallels its environment in ways that a visitor to the city by the bay might never understand. It’s hollow and bleak, and to me, it evokes early morning walks to the bus stop surrounded by the kind of cappuccino foam fog that any city in the UK would envy. Ring Around The Room is three tracks of muted aggression, any potential for stereotyped post-punk frustration delayed by sluggish drums. It’s for the most part languid and churning, but there are short bursts of forceful optimism on each song that propels the EP out of its gloomy genre orientation and into uncharted sonic spaces. The EP follows the band’s full-length Psychic Mess, which was released by Boston’s Run For Cover Records early last year, and Creative Adult has announced that they will be recording a new full-length this spring. Ring Around The Room will be released for Record Store Day. Stream the EP in full below.

Ring Around The Room will be released 4/18 via Run For Cover.