If Empires were to do a collaborative EP with Native Trash in the vein of the La Dispute/Touche Amore split, where both bands wrote material with the other band's style as inspiration, Surrenderer sounds almost exactly like the track they'dd come up with.
The first thing that hit me when I played Surrenderer for the first time is the distortion - layers and layers of it, searing all the vocals and guitars into some kind of metallic crisp. It's not something we've heard from Empires before, and this alone is enough to make the track stand out from their discography, while the other two tracks on the EP feel like more of a natural evolution.
The Native Trash parallels continue past the sepia photo filter sound, though, and into the thematic terrain. Surrenderer is like the urban younger cousin of Native Trash's 2010 EP, with all its talk of sex and death and ghosts and the way it blurs the line between reality and hallucination. It's also possibly the most compellingly dancable Empires song to date - I dare you to put it on your mp3 player on the way to work and see what happens. (Hint: public humiliation, unless you really enjoy random people on the street seeing you dance like a fool. Not that this is taken from personal experience at all.) If this one track is at all indicative of a new direction Empires is experimenting with, I'm extremely excited to see what comes next, reverb-laden vocals and all.
