Kevin Bronson on November 14th, 2016

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Considering all that has befallen singer-songwriter Chris Matthews in the past few years, it’s remarkable that his debut EP as Year of Suns, “Songs for Silence,” isn’t more bummer-pop than it is. As it stands, Year of Suns’ mostly acoustic meditations flicker with wistful hope as the Miami transplant comes to grips with the tragic losses of people close to him, the vagabond life, a gut-wrenching breakup and the seemingly uncaring outside world. Oh, and did we mention he was hit by a car in the San Fernando Valley? It’s not hard to imagine Matthews in a bedroom somewhere trying to strum his memories away, “locked down another night alone,” while his special somebody else is (kudos for the turn of the phrase) “playing hard to forget.” Says Matthews: “I never imagined myself to be the center of ‘Hard To Forget;’ maybe it was a dissociative thing, where at the time I couldn’t process the experience of it to be my own. The perspective shifts from someone in the position of being told to back off from a romantic entanglement to my own conflicts of allowing myself to be involved with detached intimacy and feeling somewhat out of control.” It makes for a beautiful, though tentative, catharsis; as always, healing is a work in progress. The EP will be out Dec. 9.

||| Stream: “Hard to Forget”

||| Also: Stream “The Undertow”