Australian emcee Thorts and Flagstaff producer (and one-half of An Illustrated Mess) Whatever Cecil first connected over the internet back in 2017. They had been bouncing ideas off of each other over the years, and at one point Thorts showed up on An Illustrated Mess song, “Phone Cards.” After all this time, they finally reached a point where things lined up and they had enough to make an EP that felt like everything fit together, a project simply titled Long Distance.

While the EP has Thorts’ and Whatever Cecil’s names on it, it feels like there should be an “& Friends” attached, because this isn’t just an EP with two artists from across the globe, there are artists from all over jumping on and adding their little piece of flavor to the mix. Over the course of five tracks, we hear from An Illustrated Mess, Soultru, Turtle, Scatty Stormborn, heirMAX, DJ Cool Handz Luke, CoCec, Joel Simeus, Kultar Ahluwalia, Jack Vaul, and Onewerd. With that many cooks in the kitchen, this EP could have easily have gotten out of hand and become a giant mess, but Thorts and Whatever Cecil do an excellent job of steering the ship and keeping the vision of this EP coherent and focused. They do that with Cecil’s deft touch in creating these moody beats that finding the meeting place between emo, art rock, and boom bap, which fit Thorts’ emotional and confessional lyricism to a tee. It’s a solid, short ride from start to finish, but the real standout track is “Being Your Dad.” It’s a song that easily could have gone over the top and become so cheesy it ruined the whole EP, but Thorts does a great job once again in just creating an honest discussion about how being a dad helps him to be a better person so that he can be there for his kids and help them learn and grow and thrive.

Long Distance is a great EP that manages to be intimate and moody, while also being fun and creating a sense of community between artists from around the globe. That’s no easy feat to pull off, but Thorts and Whatever Cecil have managed to walk that line with their first official project together.