Varas yearns for a temporary love in warm trip-hop track “Eaten by Worms”

The title track off of his third EP, Eaten by Worms, sees Varas' voice soar atop an oscillating soundscape. Like a melancholy ship at sea, he contemplates, “What would you do?”. His evocative lyrics tell a story of growing confusion as he takes drugs, creating a sort of “a temporary love.” Smooth synthesizer slips into effortless chord changes and gradually intermingle with the evolving soundscape of percussion and hazy vocal tones. The changing sounds reflect Varas’s own slow spiral into a madness of his own creation.

“The lyrics are loosely inspired by Geryon from Anne Carson’s long poem Autobiography of Red, where Geryon is a boy who is also a red, winged monster. In the song, he longs for the safety of a cage after crashing to the ground when his wings stop working,” Varas explains. “The track explores themes of self-preservation using whatever resources are available. The idea to write it likely came from the bittersweet nostalgia I felt when realizing I used to handle certain situations better.”

Made with fellow Swede producer boerd, and produced by Grammy nominee James Dring (Gorillaz, Lana Del Rey), the single reflects the heart of Varas’s six-track EP. With a balanced song structure, it reaches the perfect equilibrium between intensity and calm, and is a satisfying package of peaceful synth, dark rock, and ‘90s alt-pop.

Varas, a self-taught producer, wrote this EP in the midst of winter, which might explain its lean toward sombre introspection. With the same dark experimentalism and stellar production of Radiohead, and the cross-genre habits of contemporaries like Jean Dawson, Varas is sure to continue to rise and surprise listeners with his ever-evolving sound.

“I’ve always drawn inspiration from different types of music, and I’ve always been more intrigued by artists' musical personalities than by the genre they belong to,” he says of genre-blending. “I’m not trying to create genre-less music, but I'm fine with it if that’s how it turns out. I aim to let my personality shine through in my music, and I don’t think anyone’s personality is one-dimensional. I always contradict myself, so why wouldn’t my music?”