Kevin Bronson on September 19th, 2020

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L.A. quartet War Tapes planted their flag over a decade ago in the valley of angst, peaking with the release of “The Continental Divide,” an album of moody, bombastic rockers orbiting the worlds of the Killers, Interpol and She Wants Revenge.

The band — singer-guitarist Neil Popkin, guitarist Matt Bennett, bassist-vocalist Becca Popkin and drummer Billy Mohler — have been involved in myriad other projects since. In 2017, War Tapes signaled they weren’t over by releasing the single “Pale Blue Dot,” and last year brought the release of the 10th-anniversary edition of “The Continental Divide,” with B-sides.

This week, they announced the impending release of the new EP “Only Time Will Tell,” a five-song testament to War Tapes’ happy marriage of melody and mopery.

“These songs pull from our post-punk roots, but also dive deeper into our love for bands like the Clash and Talking Heads,” Neil Popkin says. “We started making various bedroom demos, sending them back and forth, and slowly but surely developed a new sound that we all were vibing with. We then got into Billy’s home studio and recorded these songs. We believe we’ve all gotten better at our instruments since we first started War Tapes, and so the recording process was very fluid and natural.”

“City Girls,” which was first teased in 2017, is the new single, arriving with a video directed by Jon Danovic and Sylvia Black and starring LBGTQ star MZ Neon in various settings around L.A.

The EP will come out this fall on MAKE Records, the label founded by Mohler (who produced the EP) and Aaron Smart of Silverplanes.

||| Watch: The video for “City Girls”