shea pacheco

Some records are written about experience. under ether was written from inside it.

shea pacheco — Atlanta-based singer-songwriter and the artist formerly trained as an actor — spent years studying how to inhabit a character from the inside out. Then came a period in her own life that didn't feel like hers: visions she couldn't dismiss, voices that answered back, a deepening sense that the membrane between this world and something else had grown dangerously thin. The result, documented across six tracks on under ether, is one of the most genuinely strange and emotionally precise indie rock EPs to come out of Atlanta in recent years.

Originally from Boston, Pacheco relocated to Atlanta in 2020 and came to songwriting after years in the performing arts. There's something in that background that shows — a commitment to specificity over mood, to scene over abstraction. These aren't songs about "feeling lost." They are songs about lying on a bed and watching pictures form on the ceiling. About searching for a stranger's dead friend and getting banished for it. About hearing your sister's voice on the wind at the cliffs of Galway saying she couldn't find you. About sitting in a KFC in Beijing, taking a pregnancy test over a hole in the floor, and understanding that a life is asking to begin.

The EP moves in a deliberate arc. It opens with the fracture — look out below, the lead single, captures the irony an an warm indie-pop song with lyrics about descending into madness through silence and inaction; specific terror of thoughts with nowhere to go, of a mind under pressure it can't name or release. The middle tracks descend deeper: visions of people who aren't there, shadow figures in lecture halls, the dissociated blur of living inside the ether. The bottom falls out in the shadows bounced in gold pt. 2, the EP's most harrowing moment, built around the memory of hearing a family member's voice searching for her — "we lost her" — while she stood at the edge of cliffs in Ireland. And then something shifts. prophecy surfaces a moment of being warned, in a Beijing diner, not to order a drink because a child was coming. That child — a "little brown-eyed boy" — becomes the pivot on which the entire EP turns. The closing title track confronts a spiritual reckoning head-on: told again and again that she is barred from entry, locked out, left on the street — and choosing, defiantly, to celebrate the life she has. "Let's have fun on our stay."

Recorded with an Atlanta producer and sound engineer, John Dismukes — Pacheco's first time working with a professional collaborator after two prior self-produced releases — under ether sits sonically somewhere between early Liz Phair's intimacy and Phoebe Bridgers' melancholy, with the instincts of Rilo Kiley threaded throughout. It is a record about surviving an encounter with something larger than yourself, and about accepting the ordinary miraculous world — dirt and sunlight and the feeling of rain in your hair — over whatever was calling from the other side.