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OCULA now has both a full-length This Never Happened album and a debut Monstercat EP under his belt in 2022. During summer’s waning moments, OCULA became the newest branch of the Monstercat family, inking a label deal not too long following his label entrance. And one of the unequivocally brightest acts in melodic house decided to ride the Crossroad momentum and continue to flesh out his discography even deeper into the calendar, now putting the final touches on his first complete Monstercat release, On The Run.
When “Try Me” landed almost two months ago to the day, it was abundantly overt that OCULA’s tie with Monstercat was going to be a fruitful, longstanding one. And our gut feeling of a looming larger project began trending closer in the right direction once “Renaissance” with Luke Coulson became what would be the second building block to his first extended effort since Crossroad. That inkling rang true on November 4, with OCULA going on to attach the EP’s eponymous number as well as “Waiting.”
Featuring Julia Church—whose name might be familiar from Lane 8‘s “Oh Miles“—the EP’s title cut arrives as a melodic-house ballad centered around “someone who is an enigma, hard to love and unattached, but who still exists in every fiber of your being. It’s about saving space for them in case they ever want to find their way home and reconnect.” And “Waiting”—the On The Run release day B-side—gracefully concludes the four-sided EP through a lulling three-and-a-half-minute finale. While On The Run is an undeniable continuation of OCULA’s sheer production brilliance that he’s shown time and time again, it also lays out a launch pad for his creative exploration, with him explaining,
“The main thing I’ve taken away from developing and crafting this EP is that it’s good to push myself a little out of my comfort zone, while still trusting my own abilities to make the end result work. The thought of only creating one style of music for years to come is pretty terrifying, so it’s really refreshing to mix in new sounds, explore different moods, and break the habit of resorting back to the same structure.”
If four new OCULA tracks weren’t enough in one sitting, he also doubled up on releases to server as Lane 8’s latest Reviver remixer with a take on “Watermelon Wormhole.” Stream it all below.
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