Going out on a Saturday night in your early 20s can be magical, disastrous, or somewhere in between. No matter the outcome, it’s Sunday that gives you the chance to reflect on the night before. That is the concept behind The Thing With Feathers’ upcoming EP, Sundays In The South.

The creation of the EP began in May 2020, right after band members David Welcsh, Sean Carroll, Alex Hendricks and Chris Roussell made their way back to their homes in Nashville. The first single off the EP, “Static”, started with a guitar riff before getting shelved. When they met with producer Owen Lewis later that fall, he knew that skeleton of a song had something more.

“Static” is one of two higher energy tracks that accompanies the rest of the more art forward songs. The big hooks and loud guitars is the band’s signature sound, and they wanted their audience to hear what they do best.

“‘Static’ is a pretty good culmination of our influences,” Welcsh said. “There are elements of the track you can relate to other bands, but at its core it doesn't necessarily sound like anybody else; it sounds like us.”

The single is the third track on the EP, telling the story of two main characters who may be together for the wrong reasons. It isn’t anything built to last, but it’s a situation that many can relate to in the sense of coming into your own identity and trying to navigate how that identity fits into someone else’s.

Listeners will find the two main characters in each track of the EP, starting with “Saturday Night” and ending with the title track, “Sundays In The South”. “Saturday Night” sets the stage - literally. Welcsh’s voice can be heard through a PA speaker as if you’re standing in someone’s living room watching a band plug in for a DIY house show performance.

“The intention of the song was to establish that you're going out on Saturday and you're looking for something more, and the body of work that comes after that is basically the characters’ search for that,” Welcsh said. “‘Sundays In The South’ is very much encapsulating a warm breeze, sitting out with your buddies recounting the weekend and knowing that you didn't find what you're looking for but instilling that you're ok and you get to try again. It's a nod to our youth and where we're at in our lives, and the idea of the journey and having a blank page. I think a lot of people can relate to [that], whether it's reminiscent or a hope to believe that you can keep pushing and have the opportunity to find whatever you're looking for.”

Sundays In The South was inspired by the proper Southern culture that they have experienced since moving to Nashville. Its DNA has worked its way into the people and the interactions they have with one another, so they wanted to subtly show off that influence.

The Thing With Feathers are big fans of concept records, but noticed a pattern that bands who released them were already well-established. Not only that, but whether they were subtle or aggressive concepts, they were full-length albums. While they wanted to release a cluster of songs that worked well together and could stand on their own, they wanted to try something that hadn’t been done before: a concept EP.

“It felt like a cool idea to stand alone in that way,” Welcsh said. “Although the songs are very pop-driven and the melodies are huge, they're all rather concise. The identity of the project as being a concept record and having that story there if somebody wanted to look for it was a really enthralling idea, and we wanted the songs to be able to stand alone as singles to keep us driving down the avenue that we’re on but also to leave the more artful identity projects for people if they want to look for it.”

The Thing With Feathers wanted to take a risk on their debut EP and hope that, whether the listener catches the theme or not, they find peace with what they’re looking for. “Static” may be the first single that leads to a bigger story, but that story is uniquely theirs. How the listener interprets that story is entirely up to them.