Ead Wood takes us on a trip through familiar anxieties on the excellent “Skin”

The surreal can easily shove its way into our lives, slipping through the cracks of the mundane till we are suddenly immersed in the strange and bizzare. It’s in these cracks that Ead Wood’s new single “Skin” exists, the tightrope between sunshine pop and distorted fever dream. Ead Wood’s Ed Soles maintains this balance wonderfully by never allowing “Skin” to slip too far in either direction, making for an intriguing and endlessly catchy pop jingle.

The follow-up to this summer’s “Plum Cake”, “Skin" caps off a busy last couple years which saw Ead Wood release a handful of singles alongside the EP Beige Dreams. As Ead Wood comes into their own, it’s clear they are becoming more and more comfortable exploring the peculiar corners of everyday life.

“Every blip, every pimple, everybody’s got a wrinkle / Every bruise, every cut, no one’s bigger than that” Soles sings with assurance over a beachfront bop on the front half of the track. But just as you get your footing, in comes the Tame Impala-style electric panic, followed closely by the far more surrealist and far less soothing “Everybody’s got skin, sticking out of your bed / Top of a bald man’s head, oh it’s all over my legs”.

This kind of nervy relationship with - what the song correctly points out - is our largest organ is more revalatory than immediately evident. “'Skin' was written as an ego boost and as a realisation that it doesn’t matter what we look like, we all have skin and it all looks different,” Soles explains, elaborating on an anxiety-inducing skin condition he's had to learn to deal with. It’s this willingness to wrap Ead Wood’s crisp, surf-rock sheen with a layer of introspection that makes “Skin” worthwhile.