Conan Gray - Sunset Season EP [Translucent Blue]

Before the charting albums and the arena tours, there was Sunset Season. Released in November 2018, Conan Gray's debut EP is five songs about being young in a small Texas town and desperate to be anywhere else — the record that turned a YouTube kid with a webcam into an actual recording artist.

"Idle Town" opens it, and it is still the purest statement of what Gray does: an acoustic guitar, a plainspoken vocal, and a lyric about loving a place and needing to escape it at the same time. "Generation Why" is the closest thing here to a manifesto, "Crush Culture" turns bitter singleness into a genuinely great hook, and "Greek God" and "Lookalike" fill out side B with the mix of hurt and dry humor that runs through everything he has made since.

Produced with Dan Nigro before either of them were household names, the whole EP runs under twenty minutes and does not waste a second of it. For a lot of listeners this is still the definitive Conan Gray release — the smallest and least produced version of him, and the most immediate.

This is the 10-inch EP on Republic Records, pressed on translucent blue vinyl and mastered at The Mastering Palace. A short, sharp debut in a nicely tactile format.