Eli Lev’s Past Lives is a five-song time capsule sealed with family breath and opened with trembling hands. It’s tender, yes—but it’s also sharp in its clarity. Let’s talk about that first—because it’s the heart of the project. Past Lives is a tribute in the most literal sense. Eli dug into family archives and built songs around the actual voices of his loved ones: Bubbe Sarah, Uncle Ben, and Aunt Evelyn. Their actual speech is woven into the sonic fabric—intonations, rhythms, breath, pauses. This is intimacy in WAV format and it’s moving in a way that catches you off guard, especially when Eli chooses to underspeak the sentiment instead of pushing it with dramatics.
The first single, Echo, opens with Grandma Sarah’s voice, and if you’ve ever heard an elderly relative speak in a language of another century, shaped by immigration and war, then you know why this hits deep. Her tone stays raw and steady. She speaks without performance. She’s simply there, fully present, while Eli builds a song around her—like hanging string lights around a family portrait. It begins soft—just guitar and voice—but halfway through, the arrangement opens wide: strings stretch across the mix like highway lines, percussion lands with the weight of inherited rhythm, and everything lifts into a kind of familial euphoria. It soars with purpose—because memory builds its own momentum, and the music rises to carry it.
And that push-pull between stillness and motion runs through the whole EP. Where We Come From leans into it with both hands. It plays like a conversation across generations—Jewish roots reaching out and meeting Southern soil halfway. The instruments tell the story without spelling it out. There’s a banjo in the mix, sure, but the melodies carry a trace of klezmer, like something passed down without anyone saying a word. Nothing about it feels stitched together for trend’s sake. It’s heritage built from lived details—accents, phrases, the weird family sayings that get lodged in your head forever.
My Wish Was You slows everything down. It’s the ballad, the kind every folk-pop record keeps tucked in the center. Acoustic, intimate, but crafted with care. And then there’s Who I Was—probably the most out-there track on the whole EP. This is where Eli basically erases the line between himself and the people he comes from. It’s part song, part séance, part performance piece. He writes from a voice that’s both his and… older. It hits the way it does when a kid suddenly moves or smiles exactly like their grandmother, and everyone in the room goes quiet. That’s what this track taps into.
The last song, Our Friends, lands soft. It’s about death, but it doesn’t sound like grieving. It sounds like setting another place at the table. The vibe is more “you’re still with us” than “we miss you.” And Eli doesn’t go for clichés or the usual poetic fluff. He just names the ways people linger. In how we stir soup. In how we lock the door. In the way we say goodbye without thinking about it. This track wraps it all up.
Zoom out, and the whole EP shows how Eli Lev operates. He’s got that indie-folk spirit, sure, but there’s also the brain of an archivist and the hustle of a modern DIY artist. He gets how to run a Patreon, how to drop singles on a schedule, how to keep fans tuned in. But the strategy only works because the music holds. And it really holds.
Production-wise, Past Lives walks a tightrope. It’s clean, but not sterile. There’s polish, but you still catch the imperfections—the creak of a floorboard, the scrape of memory. You can hear the Maryland roots. This EP speaks beyond Eli’s own family. It’s for anyone shaped by people handed to them by fate—those we didn’t choose, barely knew, or understood only through stories. The ones we carry anyway. No need to be deep into folk, you just need a pulse and a past.
Rarely does an EP arrive with such unassuming confidence, but this forthcoming release, due October 8, carves out a singular space. It’s a work that pulses with intention—personal yet universal, meticulously crafted yet brimming with raw emotion. This EP will likely haunt the playlists of discerning listeners for months, if not years. Pre-save it, carve out a moment to immerse yourself, and invest in headphones worthy of its sonic depth.
written by ALICE HARPER, JONATHAN MILLER
Pre -save here: https://open.spotify.com/prerelease/0rzOT8WAnU1IgAMGcS8k5L
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