★★★★☆
On the Friday (the 13th) before Valentine’s Day — perhaps the most contradictory pairing of dates on the calendar — Sarah Kinsley released her fifth EP “Fleeting.” Fittingly, the project explores the spark of falling in love, not quite being able to hold onto it, while nonetheless passionately yearning for it.
Years ago, Kinsley went viral on TikTok with her piano intro to “The King,” a song featuring some of her newest work’s defining elements: strong synths; haunting, almost Kate Bush- or Imogen Heap-like vocals; and a flair for theatrical lyricism. Since releasing “The King,” her EP that shares its name with the viral track, Kinsley has released three additional EPs and her first full-length album in 2024, titled “Escaper,” steadily refining and expanding her artistic voice.
“Fleeting” seems to echo much of what Kinsley began exploring on her 2023 EP, “Ascension.” “The King” — released in 2021 — grappled with human vulnerability and a search for footing in a world that often feels eager to sweep you away, while “Escaper” navigated grief, love, and the deeply human instinct to escape reality sometimes. Therefore, her 2023 and 2026 EPs land differently. “Ascension” acts as a bridge between her older music, which often focused on Kinsley’s internal world, and the newer themes she endeavors to explore.
Songs like “Oh No Darling!” and “Black Horse” deal with the transition to adulthood and the undergoing of a personal evolution, while “Ascension” and “Lovegod” ache with longing — for a love lost or perhaps one yet to be experienced. On “Fleeting,” Kinsley delves even deeper into that latter space. The questions now are not so much about who she is becoming but instead who she becomes in relation to those around her. The EP lingers in moments that accept loneliness and explodes in moments that explore the visceral craving to be loved, but primarily suggests that sometimes the most formative loves are the ones that don’t last.
“Fleeting” opens with “Lonely Touch,” a song that is hyperaware of its titular oxymoron. “Lonely touch, so ironic,” Kinsley sings as the song opens. She wrote the song after watching Luca Guadagnino’s 2024 film “Queer,” describing it as “an homage to the vulnerability of longing, to a yearning for a kind of touch that is undeniable and terrifying.”
“It is,” she explained, “a song about true intimacy: wanting to feel the edges of another’s soul, becoming one in the dark together.” Promoting the track on TikTok, she dubbed it “for those who YEARN,” and it delivers on that front. With verses, pre-choruses, and even choruses that climb steadily, begging for resolve, the song lacks a neat romantic resolution, but instead releases in a moment of cathartic unraveling. The outro repeats like a plea: “Where do I put my heart?” In Kinsley’s song, there is no answer, no fairy-tale ending, but it offers a really earnest way to sit inside the ache and let your emotions feel as big as they need to without the strenuous work of finding a conclusion.
“Truth of Pursuit” feels more tangible. Here, Kinsley’s longing sharpens, narrowing in on love less as a broad concept but more as something to crave from someone specific. “Oh, I wanna feel alive / Like I did, like I used to, and / Oh, go on and do what you like / ‘Cause I’m in pursuit of the feeling of you / It’s the truth of pursuit,” she sings in the chorus. The track describes the intoxicating rush of desire, but the terrifying vulnerability that comes along with wanting something you aren’t guaranteed to receive. Where “Lonely Touch” aches in ambiguity, “Truth of Pursuit” confronts the unsettling, but butterfly-inducing, nature of naming exactly who and what you want.
But Kinsley contradicts herself on the next track. If “Truth of Pursuit” delights in the thrill of fantasizing about a potential suitor, “Reverie” reins it in. Where the former indulges desire, the latter interrogates it. “Reverie” cautions against fantasizing too much in a relationship before it even begins. The opening lines linger in the fictional: “Hold back when you fantasize / You might go too far and build a life / You can’t step away from / Imagination is a sacred drug.” But, by the song’s end, the fantasy fractures, making clear the track has real roots in a failed relationship: “And the truth is there was no lost potential / You were a scapegoat for my life to unravel / It’s just a dream, don’t you get it?” Serving as both the halfway point and emotional high point of the EP, “Reverie” suggests that sometimes the ache of “yearning” is often less about the person in front of you, but more about the person you’ve romanticized them to be in your head.
“After All” is the only collaboration on the project, with Paris Paloma contributing vocals to the track. Following the emotional arc Kinsley has traced thus far, “After All” is markedly more sullen. Reminiscing on a failed relationship, Kinsley has seemed to grow disillusioned with the grand idea of love that she so excitedly desired in the first half of the EP. “Love is not enough, after all / Love is just a man I used to call, ooh / You say we were always meant to fall, after all,” she sings. It is not an explosive breakup song. In this melancholic duet, Paloma and Kinsley put their vocal ability on display, passionately reflecting on a love that, no matter how passionately pursued, cannot be sustained long-term.
“Fleeting” ends with its eponymous track. Fresh off the heels of the heavy, reflective ballad that precedes it, “Fleeting” opens with twinkly synth beats like a flicker of hope — a rainbow after the storm. The song is the perfect post-breakup dance anthem. Sure, the EP wrestles with the idea that love can be terrifying, unreciprocated, and capable of leaving behind an almost incurable heartache, but “Fleeting” reminds us that nothing — even something as awful as heartbreak — is permanent. Kinsley hears your sobs and your anger. She sees you pick up the scissors while your laptop is open to a how-to-cut-your-own-bangs-at-home tutorial, and tells you she’s been there too. Loneliness, she reminds us, is a part of being human, and even if that scares you, it can feel pretty awesome to admit it: “You say, ‘It must be this place / This city keeps on bringing me down’ / But it’s not the weather, it’s not the pressure that makes you wanna drown / You’re lonely, can’t you tell? / And you’ll feel it, even in your hometown.”
The beat itself is contagious, echoing a sense of self-liberation, a need to dance to lessen your mental load when you don’t have all the answers or solutions. You may not get a series of clean breaks throughout your life, but there is joy and freedom in moving forward nonetheless. The final track is a relieving conclusion to the emotional landscape of Kinsley’s EP and a reminder that even though love may burn hot and bright and sadness deep and blue, “It’s not forever, it’s just a feeling.”
In listening to the EP front to back in preparation for this article, I initially felt that Kinsley played it a little safer rhythmically than she did in her past work. Compared to the bold textures of “Escaper” — one of my very favorite albums of this past year — “Fleeting” didn’t quite reach the same heights for me. But as I continued to replay the five tracks over and over again, I realized that I had yet to grow tired of them. While all the songs hold their own without the context of the others, together they form a deliberate story arc — an increasingly rare art that many artists have begun to abandon in the pursuit of TikTok-ready earworms. Though “Fleeting” may not surpass the high bar set by “Escaper,” it stands confidently on its own as a cohesive, cathartic body of work that affirms Sarah Kinsley’s ability to soundtrack both our heartbreaks and healing.
