If Still Colorful were a painting, it wouldn’t hang politely in a gallery; it’d spill off the canvas, pooling on the floor, too vibrant and too curious to stay contained. WAIN’s latest EP sounds like that: equal parts cinematic scope and bedroom intimacy, a record that glows with emotion but never overplays it. The Portland-born and soon to be Los Angeles-based producer builds soundscapes that feel both engineered and alive, like something constructed with wires and pulse in equal measure.
Right from the opening track, “Three or Four,” featuring Yali, WAIN sketches his thesis statement: emotion through architecture. The song opens with soft radiance; bright chords and vocals that flutter just shy of heartbreak, before deepening into a Kygo-adjacent groove, though warmer, more deliberate. It’s the kind of song that doesn’t explode; it unfolds. WAIN’s restraint gives the melodies room to breathe, and the result feels earned rather than engineered.
“Take Me Home,” with Tay Lerner, hits like a memory of open highways and golden-hour nostalgia. It could’ve slipped neatly onto Avicii’s True if not for the way WAIN twists the formula, swapping bombast for reflection. The beat doesn’t chase you; it nudges you forward. And while it’s unabashedly melodic, there’s a flicker of melancholy underneath, the kind that turns a good road-trip song into something worth replaying once the drive ends.
The emotional center of the record comes with “I Wish I Could Fly,” featuring Shira Vysler. It shimmers; literally. The production gleams with carefully layered synths, while Vysler’s voice hovers between Hailee Steinfeld’s pop confidence and Rachel Platten’s wide-eyed sincerity. The lyrics ache, but WAIN’s production refuses to wallow. The track lifts, ascends and just when you think it might collapse under its own emotion, lands gracefully. It’s that balance of vulnerability and control that gives Still Colorful its shape.
“We Don’t Belong” pushes WAIN’s hybrid pop sensibility into alt-country territory, landing somewhere near Maren Morris if she had a soft spot for ambient textures. The song’s edges blur; like guitars dissolve into synths, vocals echo into mist. It’s not trying to fit a genre; it’s documenting the act of outgrowing one.
By “The Yellow Sign,” featuring Yotal, the EP slows to something quieter, more intimate. It’s WAIN at his most cinematic, turning a simple ballad into a widescreen emotional moment. There’s a pulse beneath the piano that keeps the track from slipping into sentimentality. Yotal’s vocals sell the moment: earnest, exposed, but unafraid. Think Alex Warren with a bit more grace and fewer histrionics.
Then comes “Colorful,” the closer featuring Orian, and it’s a finale worthy of the title. WAIN pulls every sonic thread tight; his lush instrumentation, his sense of pacing, his near-obsessive attention to texture and lets it all bloom. It’s cinematic without being indulgent, hopeful without being saccharine. The track builds, swells, and resolves in a way that feels less like an ending and more like exhalation.
Across Still Colorful, what stands out most isn’t the immaculate production itself, but how emotionally articulate it feels. WAIN’s mix of organic and electronic textures doesn’t just sound good; it feels necessary. You can hear his engineering discipline in the way space is used, how every sound knows its place, but you can also sense the heart behind it all. It’s pop music for people who like to close their eyes while they listen; not to escape, but to look inward.
If there’s a critique, it’s that the record sometimes feels too self-contained, too immaculate for its own good. You catch yourself wanting a bit more chaos; a frayed edge, a loose thread, a risk that doesn’t resolve. Yet maybe that’s the point. Still Colorful sounds like an artist in complete control, mid-transition, looking toward Los Angeles not for reinvention but expansion.
WAIN’s strength lies in his refusal to settle for aesthetic. Each track is its own emotional architecture; designed, tested, and, finally, felt. And while the EP runs under half an hour, it lingers like a longer story. The title isn’t metaphor; it’s promise. Even in restraint, WAIN remains, well, still colorful.
It’s rare to find a producer who treats every decibel like narrative weight, rarer still to make that precision feel human. WAIN does both, and Still Colorful isn’t the sound of an artist finding his voice; it’s the sound of one trusting it.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
