Bartees Strange – ‘Shy Bairns Get Nowt’ EP review: Strange waters run deep

Posted On October 23, 2025October 23, 2025

The polymath singer-songwriter follows up one of the most interesting records of the year with an EP that trades in his trademark eclecticism for more focused genre pastiches, with spectacular results.

The Skinny: Bartees Strange has made a career out of being about four different solo artists in one. There’s the raucous indie rocker, the howling bluesman, the hip-hop producer and the tender singer-songwriter all fighting for prominence in music that at its peak can be the best of all possible worlds. From his debut single ‘Boomer’, we were seeing chiming, Johnny Marr-esque guitar lines under a JPEGMAFIA-esque rap flow, before the song was driven home by thunderous hard rock riffage.

This genre experimenting has dominated his music since, and while Strange himself has had the songwriting chops to pull it off, one wonders what he could do if he played it straight. Rather than pour everything into the same gumbo, what if he let everything speak for itself and let each genre stand on its own? That’s seemingly the task that Bartees set for himself on this set, despite the reason for the record being in his mind, nothing more than writing a few songs after this past February’s fantastic record Horror was released and wanting them out sooner rather than later.

Thus, we get a gorgeous, melodic EP that, above all else, shows just what a rare and incredible voice Strange has. Not one that he’s been hiding from us all these years, quite the opposite. However, hearing it unadorned and vulnerable, like on opener ‘BTNY’, indie rock rave-up ‘Pigs Fly’ and the astonishing reworking ‘Baltimore’, one of the most powerful moments of Horror, is a completely different prospect from hearing it as just another part of a raucous production begging for our attention.

The Verdict: Bartees does it again. By stripping things back, we get a more human side of the wunderkind, one that shows off the once-in-a-generation songwriter and musician powering all the genre-mashing. These are songs strong enough to have an album based on them, so one can only sit and wonder what Strange has got planned for the future if songs like this can be rattled off and released as a tour EP. Until then, we bairns must have been causing a din, ‘cos we’ve got everything with this EP.

Defining song: ‘Baltimore (Jack’s Version)’

Release date: October 24th, 2025 | Producer: Bartees Strange and Jack Antonoff | Label: 4AD

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