Some artists move forward by subtraction; others by return. On Shadow Shades, Monoconda does both. Stripping away the layered architectures of his recent work, he returns to the guitar—the first instrument he ever played—not as nostalgia, but as a recalibration. What emerges is neither acoustic intimacy nor electronic abstraction, but something suspended between the two: a raw, overdriven signal searching for form.
The EP feels less like a composed statement than a transmission. Monoconda himself frames his work not as authorship, but as reception — “it’s not me making music, it’s the music that writes the story of my life,” he tells me over a Telegram exchange. That philosophy is audible here. Each track seems to arrive mid-thought, shaped by what he calls “magical accidents,” then patiently guided into coherence. The result is a sequence that resists closure, preferring instead to hover in states of tension.
“Breathe” opens with a deceptive calm, the guitar tracing fragile contours before the surface begins to fracture. By the time “Attack” arrives, that fragility has given way to density — layers pressing against each other without fully resolving, clashing and contorting. Monoconda moves fluidly between these extremes: delicacy and overload, control and collapse.
The title track, “Shadow Shades,” sits at the centre of the EP’s conceptual gravity, though Monoconda resists fixing meaning to it. It marks a point where the music seems to take flight, pushing forward with renewed momentum. There is, by design, a refusal of explanation. Titles such as “Meltdown” and “Shockwave” suggest rupture, but the music itself leaves space for interpretation, opening a dialogue rather than delivering a verdict. As he notes, “there should be a mystery left… I’m probably even more curious about what you hear there than you are about what I mean.”
This openness is key. If earlier releases like Horizon (2022) drifted toward ambient lightness, and Identity (2022) explored dub-inflected structures, Shadow Shades continues the darker trajectory initiated on Disturbing (2024), but with a crucial shift. Where that record felt compressed — tracks imploding in short, saturated bursts — this EP allows those impulses to expand, to breathe within instability. The guitar becomes both anchor and disruptor: its grain is tactile, almost physical, grounding even the most abstract passages.
This is the second work by a Ukrainian artist after Smelting by worse to be released by Slikback on his new imprint. Monoconda describes the production process: “I sent about ten tracks to Xternal Domain, hoping for a release there. Freddy (Slikback) highlighted the last three, each with a guitar at its core, and asked if there were more like them. So I made another three to complete a story. I’m very grateful to him for pointing me in that direction. It sounds raw, natural, dirty, and overdriven — and that’s how life feels now for a lot of us, revealing both the dark and the light within.”
There is indeed a sense that this music is shaped as much by external conditions as by internal states. These are not compositions that seek balance so much as they inhabit imbalance — what he calls a “perilous” mental space, defined by difficult choices and incomplete answers.
“Dead Space,” the closing track, leaves the listener suspended. It neither resolves nor collapses, but lingers in a kind of liminal afterglow, as if the signal has been cut but the resonance remains. It is an ending that refuses finality, echoing Monoconda’s belief that meaning is not fixed but shared, unfolding between artist and listener.
In this sense, Shadow Shades is less a counterpart to previous work, such as Overwhelming Growth (2025), than a continuation of a process — one that privileges intuition over intention, and experience over explanation. It asks not to be understood, but to be inhabited. (Gianmarco Del Re)
a closer listen 