A fair amount of people are probably going to lump Keep Shelly in Athens with the rest of the loosely-designated chillwave aesthetic. For decent enough reason, they have the head-spun wooziness, the colors-running vagueness, and the clubby euphoria – all fair staples of the scene – and like their contemporaries, the Grecian duo emerged with a certain level of (somewhat misguided) mystique; all blotted press photos and an enigmatically allusive blogspot. What we do know is that the EP at hand, In Love With Dusk, first emerged in November of last year, and was quickly sold out – ostensibly because the band has managed to link six fairly-perfect dance tunes that melts away the frosty Balearic atmosphere with a thermal euphoria – one which hacks away at your pleasure centers with a full-force of curious impeccability.

The EP opens with its most outwardly druggy track, the fuzzed dawdling of ‘Running Out of You’ – also the song responsible for the most hype pre-release – it has the ambiguous Sarah P singing through the clearest vocal channel on the record, daintily floating over treble-bursting MIDI drum machine stomps. But when the back-half of the song becomes unhinged amongst a Huey Lewis synth fist-pumper and scattering “break it down!” vocal samples, that experimentalist loitering is put away for good. For the next 18 minutes In Love With Dusk is the antithesis of burden; it demands nothing of your physicality or patience, just your un-cupped ears – lazily guiding you through a miasma of smooth-jazz horn indulgences, tranquilized keyboards, and cooing, seductive sing-songs; all the while never sounding the least bit boring. It’s pure hedonism really, an experiment in turning the most hated elements of pop music into something remarkably refreshing.

For the most part In Love With Dusk is a producer’s album, the unnamed, non-singing half of Keep Shelly in Athens turns in four instrumentals that serve as the record’s core. The band’s second-most buzzed track ‘Fokionos Negri Street’ comes after the opener, it’s a silken tapestry of garbled radio-shifting samples, elastic guitar bounces, and those aforementioned horns (which show up on pretty much every composition). ‘Cremonia Memories’ is probably the most identifiably “chillwave” track of the batch, comprising the shellacked drums and the bathing atmospheres most of us know the aesthetic for, but towards the end a brilliantly-cued soul sample sends the song into another dimension of hugeness. The beatific title-track closes everything out with a sunny, but evasive guitar, whistling synths, and a “woo-ooh!” chorus – just as delightfully odd as everything else. And then the record is gone just as quick as it came, leaving me strangely ajar. It’s such an enrapturing experience for the 20 minutes it floats by that I was left a little personally roused when the music stopped; all I could really do was play it again and again. That’s not a fault against the band of course, they just need to release an actual LP – judged by the quality of this brief taste – I think we all have reasons to be excited.