Nate Terepka's Solo Record Not Yet out Today.

When Nate Terepka began working on what would become Not Yet, he didn’t expect it would trace the rise and fall of his relationship. The EP’s five songs appear in the order they were written, and so move from an expression of utter, loving devotion, to blindsided heartbreak and closure. In the course of this relatively brief recording it all happens rather quickly. But the emotional and compositional depth of Terepka’s work effectively stands in for the passage of time.

In the 2010s, Terepka co-fronted the indefatigable Brooklyn psychedelic pop band Zula. The group garnered heaps of love from the Village Voice, SPIN, and Stereogum, who praised the quartet’s “unwillingness to abide by any particular genre conventions.” After Zula disbanded in 2019, Terepka shifted his focus to teaching music, eventually relocating to Portland, OR. “At that moment,” Terepka says, “I let go of my ambition to ‘make it’ professionally as an artist, which was really liberating. I told myself I wouldn’t work on any new music until I organically and genuinely felt like it.”

These songs mark Terepka’s return to writing and recording and so, unsurprisingly, Not Yet is imbued with a sense of organic necessity. “Find Me Where You Look,” with its buoyant, electropop feel and warm, shimmering, glissando synthesizers is an intuitive celebration of love, meticulously constructed but thoroughly free of self-doubt. “The Woods” is equally meticulous and perhaps even more introspective, narrating a disciplined exercise Terepka undertook, taking a several hours-long walk in the woods while thinking through every year of his life in chronological order, attempting to remember everything he possibly could. Piano and synthesizers trace serpentine paths through a steady groove, all of which might call to mind Robert Wyatt’s Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard. This track too, references the love that would eventually, unexpectedly dissolve. “I know that you love me now / makes me want to shake off the rest of these ghosts,” Terepka sings in an aching moment of foreshadowing. The sense of organic necessity continues throughout Not Yet, deepening by the closing track. “Saying It” is a sweeping piano-driven drama that recalls Dennis Wilson’s “Thoughts of You” as much as it does Sparklehorse or Amen Dunes.

Despite the collapse that characterizes this record’s denouement, Not Yet is anything but bitter. Its own existence saves it from that. “Working on this new set of songs and recordings felt very pure,” Terepka says. “It was the first time since I was an adolescent that I was making music for my own self-expression, untainted by ambitions for any particular kind of success in a scene. I think that’s why I feel so good about this project.”

written and recorded by Nate Terepka

GUESTS Dana Billings: drums on “Saying It”

Megan Hattie: modular noise on “The Field”

Booker Stardrum: drums & percussion on “Silence”

Henry Terepka: electric guitars on “The Woods”

mixing, mastering, and additional engineering by David Pollock

cover photo by Megan Hattie