The five tracks here — *Over*, *Glass Houses*, *I Know Better*, *Lost or Won*, *Runaway* — sit comfortably in the company of The National's slow-burn emotional weight and the atmospheric density of Mogwai at their most restrained, while occasionally evoking Beach House's capacity for turning reverb into a kind of emotional weather system. But these are textures rather than blueprints. By Million Wires are not a band of obvious debts.

The EP's centre of gravity is *I Know Better*, and it earns that status. What immediately distinguishes it from the surrounding tracks is its rhythmic architecture: a swaying, triple-meter pulse that gives the song an unusual physical quality, something between a waltz and a slow reckoning. Most guitar-driven alternative music lives in four-four, marching forward with predictable certainty. *I Know Better* sways. It tilts. It creates the sensation of something slightly off-balance — which turns out to be precisely right for a song whose subject is the particular confidence of someone who has learned things the hard way. The guitar textures here recall the shimmering precision of Editors at their most controlled, while the melodic sensibility has the elegiac quality Death Cab For Cutie do so well — that trick of making something deeply personal feel universally recognisable. It is a song about autonomy, about the quiet authority of someone who no longer needs to argue their case. Mirek Skrok doesn't oversell it. His vocal sits inside the arrangement rather than above it, which is exactly the right instinct.

Skrok's ascent to frontman is, in fact, the EP's defining gamble and its most convincing success. The departure of Anna — whose lyrical storytelling and distinctive voice defined the band's first chapter — could have been a wound that never healed. Instead it appears to have been a recalibration. Where *Letters to the Absent* was ethereal and airy, built around vocals that floated above the instrumentation, Skrok's deeper, more grounded delivery pulls everything downward into the body of the music. The guitars don't frame him; they envelop him. The result is a sound that feels considerably more interior — less a band describing emotion from the outside and more one transmitting it from somewhere uncomfortably close.

*Over* opens the record with admirable patience, establishing the band's grammar before asking you to parse any sentences. *Glass Houses* is where that grammar becomes literature — a track that understands dynamics as an emotional rather than merely structural tool, building and releasing tension with the kind of compositional intelligence that cannot be faked or rushed. *Lost or Won* and *Runaway* complete the arc with a sense of genuine resolution, tracks that feel like the back half of a long conversation rather than filler padding out a runtime.

What *Not Over* ultimately demonstrates is that By Million Wires spent their silence well. This is not a band scrambling back into relevance. The self-produced record is deliberately unpolished in the best sense — nothing has been ironed flat, no edge sanded down for easier consumption. The rawness is structural, not accidental. And in an independent music landscape increasingly dominated by algorithmic smoothness, that roughness feels quietly radical.

The EP's title turns out to be less a statement of defiance than a statement of fact. Some bands, like some conversations, simply are not over. On this evidence, By Million Wires are only just getting started again.