Greg Mendez Signs With Dead Oceans, Announces New EP

Last year, Greg Mendez filled the folk music world with his very good self-titled record, which wound up on our year-end list. The song “Maria” landed on our best songs of the year list, too, cementing 2023 as perhaps the biggest chapter in Mendez’s career thus far. But now, he has announced his signing with Dead Oceans and will have a new EP coming out next month.

First Time / Alone is set to arrive on October 18, and Mendez will celebrate this new direction with a co-headline tour with Allegra Krieger and a support slot on a string of Angel Olsen dates. The EP was recorded last summer and fall, and the songs were written following intensive surgery on Mendez’s wrist and a four-month period of no touring and copious physical therapy sessions. According to a press release, the experience of listening to First Time / Alone “is like waking up from a half-remembered dream, a shadow in the corner of the room, a strange solitude, a temporal New York autumn with gray skies and naked trees. But while the release is sparse and spontaneous, it’s tactile and consuming, a glimpse into the beautiful, lonely worlds that live in the core of a Greg Mendez song.”