During the last gasps of August, KL!NG's first EP came into the world, grew legs, and personified itself into a fun house. Think buckets of neon green paint, a ball pit, a wall-to-wall mirrored metallic bathroom and a projector dedicated to running continuous episodes of Twin Peaks.
That's the setting each attendee stepped into during KL!NG's hyper-DIY release party, transforming a residential home for two performances of 5 SONG SWEETIE PIE! complete with a local band lineup and a burlesque performance. It's a rare occurrence where the listener gets the chance to step inside the album, beckoned by a circus of flaming guitar riffs, dual harmonies and shuddering drum beats.
Self-described as "experimental garage rock basement candy," the trio fuses a supergroup of Iowa City talent via Lex Leto, Elly Hofmaier and Aaron Knight. Now, a little over a year after the band's official formation, beginning with a raucous live debut at two back-to-back festivals (Iowa City's Infinite Dream and Whitewater's Strange LaGrange), KL!NG puts their playfulness to audio in swift, eight-minute fashion.
The first song, "under yer nose!" doesn't start, it roars. Droning guitars and trippy chanting devolve through the acrobatic quality of Hofmaier and Letos' vocals, where screams punctuate words and octaves drop in an instant. Representing some of the best basement-brewed grunge, each song is meticulously recorded and produced by KL!NG, along with mixing and mastering magic from Avery Moss.
With each listen, the smallest details emerge, making the final product more hypnotic and addictive, all swept up in explosive drumming and repetitious chords that flirt between surf rock and distorted punk. At one point, a raw moment from the recording session interjects the opening track's wall of sound as Knight tells the rest of the band, "Yeah, let's listen back to that." It's intimate and charming -- just like their homemade merch or band flip phone. On "automobile!," the EP reaches its highest point, creating a sound collage of engine ignitions and train whistles -- all while listing the forms of transportation the singer is, indeed, not. Hofmaier growls deep into the microphone, "I am not an elevator / why don't you just take the stairs," in an act of defiant, delicious liberation.
Throughout these five tracks KL!NG is on a high wire, pulling off a balancing act between genres, voices, guitars and tempo beats. Something's gotta give. And it does, closing out with the song "unlaced!" For just under a minute, the line breaks, and the soundscape cracks open into an ear-splitting finale, satisfying and far too brief of a peek inside the fun-house pipes.
One of the first rooms that greeted release party houseguests was a punctuation-themed room, drenched with glittering exclamation points hung from the ceiling. If you couldn't tell from the stylization of the band name and the tracklist, exclamation points are kind of their thing. So, in true KL!NG fashion, this EP deserves the most enthusiastic round of (!!!).
This article was originally published in Little Village's October 2024 issue.