BESTFRIEND HAS AN IDENTITY CRISIS sounds like the soundtrack to a coming-of-age film that hasn’t been written yet. It’s about the confusion, infatuation, doubt, and tentative hope of your twenties, compressed into six sharp alt-pop songs. The new EP from Bestfriend — the long-distance duo of Stacy Kim and Kaelan Geoffrey — trades the backward-looking melancholy of their earlier work for something more immediate and propulsive. These aren’t songs about the past. They’re songs about right now, and they shimmer with the urgency of figuring things out as you go.
There are echoes of Give Up-era Postal Service and flashes of early Stars in the EP’s softer moments, particularly the way emotion is worn openly and without smarm or corniness. The duo’s vocal delivery sounds conversational, almost offhand at times, but threaded with a kind of lived-in charm that feels like every line was lifted from a journal. Precise and chaotic, polished and emotionally raw.
The standout single “HEADSTART” delivers the EP’s biggest emotional high, but even at its most scream-along exuberant, there’s a thread of uncertainty running underneath. That tension — between confidence and confusion, self-assurance and anxiety — is everywhere on this record.
By the end of the EP, the stress of the opening tracks has softened: progress is possible, even if clarity isn’t. For an old head like me, BESTFRIEND HAS AN IDENTITY CRISIS is nostalgia for a summer from young adulthood: sweet, sharp, uncertain, and optimistic. It reminded me of a book I read recently, describing the fragile kind of reassurance you offer yourself in moments like these: that “…by Monday, everything will be fine, or almost everything, or almost fine”. That feels like the emotional center of this record — not quite certain, not quite resolved, but still moving forward.
