Tiny the Dream – The Cycle
Buffalo-based outfit, Tiny the Dream, have become local mainstays after a flurry of successful releases the last few years, with their 2024 The Window EP, in particular, garnering them support and placing them a “band to watch” radar for all WNY music fans.
Earlier last month, the group, spearhead by producer Suzanne Bonifacio and artist-producer Adam Pressley, returned empathically with the release of their new EP, The Cycle, an ambitious, meditative exploration of life’s innate, meandering nature and the ways things always seem to come back around.
Sonically, the project juxtaposes elements of rock and pop seamlessly, oftentimes within the same song. “Cute Anthem,” for example, a track which Bonifacio described to have “cracked my code, getting me back here for presence, love, sharing, [and] connection,” boasts a huge, thunderous chorus that sits wonderfully between a verse-bridge segment seeping with early 2000’s pop undertones. The project’s title-track, while thematically consistent, strips it all back to just Bonifacio and an acoustic guitar. It’s often said the best-written songs sound good in just about any context, and this one is no different.
Thematically speaking, the EP couldn’t be any richer. So much of life is spent in waiting, allowing things to unfold, to start, stop, and start again, all while sitting with questions that oftentimes teach by themselves. The Cycle is a meditation on self-doubt, an experience inherent both to the creative process and our lived experiences as a whole. It’s a project less interested in a definitive answer, and more in the very questions that characterize the cyclical nature of life: What do we do in waiting, in doubt, in healing?
Whatever it is, it’ll certainly entail the very authenticity and connection so much of this project seeks to cultivate.
You can listen to the full EP here, and keep up with Tiny the Dream both across the internets here.
Categorised in: Album of the Week
This post was written by Ben Frigeri