For whatever reason, the anxiously peppy, post-Campesinos indie rock combo Me Rex tend to do their best work in the EP format. (Their peak, for me, is still the double-EP that essentially functioned as an album.) So it’s good news that the band announced a new EP this week — even better that its opening track presents Myles McCabe’s word-splattered pop-rock at its most fervently catchy.

The EP is called Smilodon, keeping up the habit of naming records after prehistoric creatures. “Goodbye Forever” features bashed-out drums, an unhinged synthesizer line, and some of McCabe’s most impassioned singing. “I know everybody quietly will learn to hate surprises/ That’s alright, that’s all fine,” he exclaims. “Nobody I know gets to be their best self all the time/ So don’t go changing/ Don’t go growing/ Don’t go leaving us alone again.”

In a note to Bandcamp subscribers, McCabe wrote:

It’s about adjusting to loss, bargaining with reality and accepting change. I originally wrote it a number of years ago, I didn’t realise at the time that I was writing a “breakup song” for a relationship I had been in. That’s not a concept I’m particularly keen on but I think I managed to steer clear of grievance and reproach.

Today this song resonates much more with my experience of grief, the pains of growing into an existence that no longer includes someone who felt fundamental to it, a resistance to accept the new terms of life, a futile defiance that has to be shouted as loud as possible.

Listen below.

Smilodon is out 5/1. Pre-order it here.