Pour Over formed over the past year through Reddit and Craigslist posts, making great use of the powers of the Internet and friendship. That collaboration has culminated in the DC-area band’s debut EP, So Sorry, a solid entry into the fifth-wave emo canon blending Midwestern emo and power-pop in the spirit of Algernon Cadwallader and Alex G.
What resulted from distant online connections is a tightly engineered and well-performed six-song record. Zahin Huq’s vocals and guitar work with steady rhythms from Paul McGrath’s bass and Austin Braswell’s drums create a peak emo sound with layers of reverb and harmony to wash over you while you listen. But despite the slick production from Jake Buter’s Stud Ranch and Azimuth Mastering’s Bill Henderson, the music retains a homemade garage-band feel, with everything just unhinged and loose enough to hint at the true passion and emotion in the music.
The artwork from Sean Suchara hints at a winding, labyrinthine castle, where dangers lurk at every turn, and the hero walks into the fray, unaware of what lies ahead, almost apprehensive at the thought of battle. That apprehension of showing their emotional vulnerability shines on tracks like “Scorpio Moon”, where Huq screams through the rush of jangling guitars “, I wanna die in the backseat of your Camry.” Such a stunning admission is not rare in the echelon of emo, but when delivered well, it still strikes the heartstrings.
So Sorry allows you to follow along with the emotional journey and repeated blood-letting via scrawled lines in a notebook, as the album progresses through “Monsters Under Your Bed” (“I self-sabotage because I know you want to leave”) and “Despite Everything, It’s Still You” (“I wish I knew how to love you”). As Pour Over prepares to take their act to the DIY live show circuit, these phrases will certainly get some audience participation.
The final song, “Pretty Girls Don’t Light Their Own Cigarettes”, stems from an earlier demo Huq posted on Spotify back in February. Where that track was a four-minute exploration of shoegaze, So Sorry truncates it to under two minutes, cropping it down to a sparkling refrain with Huq’s muted vocals underneath the music, singing “Running out of luck/Watch me as I self-destruct” on loop as the quality degrades and the track suddenly stops, like a cassette running out of battery.
It’s a fitting end to an album that exhausts a great deal of emotional energy in just six tracks and about twelve minutes. And the title So Sorry acts as a pre-emptive apology to all of it, but it need not do so. This is the work of musicians coming together to craft a message of pure emotion and contain it within the boundaries of time and sonic space. It seems strange to apologize for such a deliberative act.
Pour Over is Zahin Huq (guitar/vocals), Paul McGrath (bass), and Austin Braswell (drums). So Sorry was released on 31 October 2025 and is available on Bandcamp and all major streaming platforms.
Written by Will Sisskind
