Opener "Looking 4 U" sets the terms immediately: a live electric bassline, wound tight and restless, doing the work that a hundred other producers would have handed off to a synth patch. There's something almost physical about it — you can hear the strings, hear the room — and against that analog pulse, melliejellie builds a track that genuinely captures the frantic, low-grade panic of looking for yourself in other people. The key change, when it arrives, doesn't announce itself with fireworks; it just tilts the whole track sideways, like a thought you didn't mean to have. It's a clever bit of songwriting dressed up as a club move, and it's the kind of detail that separates artists who understand tension from artists who merely simulate it.

Then comes "I Won't Wait 4 U," the EP's lead single and, frankly, its thesis statement. It starts as speed garage — all skip and snap, that particular London-via-the-internet swing — before mutating into a full drum n bass charge partway through. This is a genuinely satisfying pivot, the sort of structural risk that could easily collapse under its own ambition but instead lands with real conviction, because the emotional arc matches the sonic one. The song is about choosing yourself over waiting on somebody else's timeline, and the beat itself refuses to wait too — it accelerates out of patience and into resolve. Few tracks this year have made "moving on" sound this physically thrilling.

The closer, "I Want U 2 Tell Me," is where the EP earns its keep. After the searching and the sprinting, melliejellie pulls back into something rawer and more vulnerable, and the Y2K nostalgia that's been humming under the whole project finally steps into full view. It plays like a hand reaching from the past into the future — not as an act of regression, but as an act of integration, a stable sense of self finally able to look backward without flinching. It's the rare closing track that actually earns its emotional payoff rather than just performing one.

What elevates *ALL ABOUT U* beyond a well-sequenced trio of songs is the world built around it. melliejellie has described the project as an act of reclaiming digital space — a daydream of the '90s before the internet got complicated, when "dance music" meant Dance Dance Revolution and most of life still happened offline. That philosophy isn't just marketing copy; it's structurally embedded in the release itself. Every CD and cassette is hand-burned and packaged with original artwork by her sister, the Seattle-based artist emipokapoka, making this as much a visual and physical object as a musical one. In an era when most electronic music arrives as a frictionless stream and nothing more, there's something quietly radical about insisting the listener hold something in their hands.

It would be easy to file *ALL ABOUT U* under "nostalgia act" and move on. That would be a mistake. This is nostalgia used as a tool rather than a crutch — analog instrumentation, real basslines, real hands, deployed in service of songs that are fundamentally about growth: searching, refusing to wait, and finally asking to be known. Three tracks, no filler, and a clear sense of who melliejellie is and where she's headed. More, please.