The title track serves as the EP's emotional fulcrum, a stark meditation on pandemic-era estrangement that finds its protagonists "isolated in their own ecosystem – like Astronauts." It's a metaphor that could easily veer into the maudlin, yet Welham and Liu navigate these treacherous waters with remarkable restraint. The song's distorted bassline – a deliberate nod to The Fall's "Tempo House" – provides a queasy foundation over which Liu's vocals float with an otherworldly detachment that recalls both Nico's glacial delivery and the ethereal menace of early Siouxsie Sioux.
What strikes one most forcefully about Astronauts is its refusal to provide easy comfort. This isn't pandemic music as catharsis; it's pandemic music as autopsy. Recorded in Welham's West London home studio, the EP bears the sonic hallmarks of its origins – intimate yet claustrophobic, lo-fi yet precisely crafted. There's a deliberate roughness to the production that feels less like limitation than aesthetic choice, each crackle and hiss serving to reinforce the sense of domestic isolation that permeates the work.
The duo's evolution from their early singles – "Doctor Strange," "North Atlantic Station" – through to this more cohesive EP format represents a creative maturation that's both impressive and slightly unsettling. Where their earlier work occasionally felt scattered, Astronauts possesses a focused intensity that suggests artists who've found their voice by necessity rather than design. The ghost of William Burroughs haunts these proceedings (quite literally, given the band's nomenclature), lending proceedings a cut-up surrealism that prevents the material from descending into mere diary-entry confessionalism.
Liu's vocal performance deserves particular praise – there's a vulnerability here that never tips into self-pity, a strength that avoids becoming strident. She inhabits these songs like a method actor inhabiting a role, completely committed to the emotional reality whilst maintaining just enough distance to prevent total collapse. Welham's instrumental contributions provide the perfect counterpoint, all angular guitars and unsettling rhythmic shifts that keep the listener perpetually off-balance.
The comparison to The Fall is apt but not entirely accurate – where Mark E. Smith's outfit dealt in deliberate antagonism and wilful obscurity, Ghost of Panama's approach feels more genuinely wounded. There's real pain here, transmuted through art into something approaching transcendence. It's the sound of two people working through shared trauma whilst maintaining enough artistic distance to craft something genuinely affecting.
Astronauts succeeds precisely because it doesn't attempt to solve anything. These aren't songs about overcoming adversity or finding silver linings in dark clouds; they're about sitting with discomfort, about finding strange beauty in isolation, about the peculiar intimacy that emerges when the familiar world becomes suddenly alien. In an era of manufactured authenticity and algorithmic emotion, Ghost of Panama offer something altogether more genuine – the sound of real people grappling with real circumstances, filtered through a sensibility that's both thoroughly contemporary and oddly timeless.
The EP's brevity works in its favour – at this intensity, anything longer might prove unbearable. As it stands, Astronauts feels perfectly calibrated, a concentrated dose of pandemic unease that manages to be both deeply specific to its historical moment and mysteriously universal. It's the sound of 2020-2021 crystallised into art, and for all its discomfort, it's rather beautiful.