Tales Of Water – FML (2025)
Tales Of Water’s latest EP, FML, is like an exposed nerve humming under constant tension. It’s a record that doesn’t ask for your attention so much as demand it, pulling the listener into a world shaped by Weltschmerz, powerlessness, and the everyday violence faced by FLINTA* people. Moving between furious intimacy and fragile vulnerability, FML sketches an unflinching portrait of the present moment with direct, honest, and unwilling to look away.
The EP unfolds in a state of permanent overload. Politically, socially, emotionally, everything feels both precarious and threatening at once. Tales Of Water captures this sense of imbalance with remarkable clarity, translating diffuse anxieties into sharply drawn emotional scenes. There’s no distance here, no metaphorical fog to hide behind. Instead, the songs operate like close-ups, forcing us to sit with discomfort rather than smoothing it over.
At the heart of FML is the voice of a mother trying to find grounding amid the chaos. Her fears and questions run like a quiet but persistent thread through the record, anchoring its broader social observations in something deeply personal. On ‘How Do I Care’, the line “Tell me how do I care without caring too much?” distils the EP’s central conflict: how to protect the people you love without burning yourself out in the process. It’s a question that feels painfully current, especially in a world where caring itself can feel like an act of resistance.
The title track makes that sense of overwhelm explicit. “Fuck today is hard, feels like I’m just falling apart, feels like all the weight of the world rests on my heart,” the voice confesses, articulating a daily heaviness many listeners will recognise instantly. The song doesn’t offer solutions. Instead, it poses a harder question: how do you remain capable of action when the pressure from the outside never lets up?
What makes FML compelling is the way it fuses individual fear with sharp social awareness. These songs navigate the constant back-and-forth between private worries and global crises, between personal exhaustion and structural inequality. Violence and injustice are not treated as abstract concepts here; they are lived realities, shaping everyday emotions and decisions. Yet within that exhaustion, the EP also gestures toward solidarity, a growing awareness that these fears are shared, that isolation is part of the lie.
Despite its weight, FML carries an undercurrent of resolve. There’s a quiet insistence on not looking away, not staying silent, not shrinking oneself to fit a hostile world. Tales Of Water deliberately avoid comforting illusions. Instead, they create space where pain and clarity can coexist, and where that honesty becomes a source of strength.
FML is not a balm; it’s a wake-up call. An EP to take vulnerability seriously, to acknowledge the fractures running through society, and, even then, to keep searching for ways not to give up.
Find out more about Tales Of Water on their official website, Instagram, YouTube, Bandcamp and Spotify.
Listen to more alternative pop music on The Other Side Reviews Alternative Pop playlist:
