Crooked Cranes’ EP This is Only a Test is an unstable, emotionally charged exploration of instability—relationship, identity, and purpose. Through its five tracks, the lyrics construct overall an existential drift narrative, in which personal events—pulled often towards chaos or devastation—are less presented as standalone events than symptomatic of deeper disorientation with self and location. While each song has its own tale, the EP lies in the manner the stories intertwine, telling in their entwined emotional strand an arc traced out through betrayal, self-medication, momentary euphoria, and ongoing quest for escape.

The lyrical world of This is Only a Test is all about tenuous relationships and the resultant disillusionment. Whether it’s the gut-level betrayal in “GF” or the gradual realization of deception in “Met a Gurl,” the EP is filled with the aftermath of love devastation. What connects those experiences is the refusal on the part of Crooked Cranes not to glamorize suffering. The relationships aren’t tragedies—disorienting, violent, and absurd. The phrase “I don’t even know why I try” is not a query—it’s an admission. This lyrical desperation runs throughout the EP, leaving the impression that love isn’t difficult—its actually painful, an exercise in optimism and devastation.

That cyclical destruction brings the artist into the realm of escapism, most pronounced in the case of “Mehico,” but the cycle appears in attenuated forms everywhere. It is through chemicals, aimlessness in flight, emotional withdrawal, that Crooked Cranes describes detachment as reflex and as illness. The routine compulsion to become, or become, “stoned,” in order to escape, to anesthetize sense, is the mark of an existential suspicion of the world. It doesn’t appear as an ethos—there is no glamour here—but as an adaptive strategy. The title of the EP gains extra pathos here: This is Only a Test would imply that the emotional devastation is temporary, or virtual, but the words rule out the possibility. There is nothing in the suffering that is abstracted—it is lived-in and actual.

Beneath the snarl and the fury, there is an unexpected consistency about the way the artist approaches the passage of time, the motion. The lyricism is always pushing toward movement, literal highway in “Interstate Song,” emotional spinning-out in “Dolfin.” There is rarely stasis, rarely reflection in the traditional sense. Even when Crooked Cranes gazes back, it is in the rearview mirror of memory, not in clarity, but in distortion—pain, fixation, regret. Disorientation in and of itself constitutes an underlying lyrical identity: an artist whose emotional compass is faulty, who keeps moving because standing still is not an option.

In all the impulsiveness, the bitterness, it is here that the EP finds its strength. There is no pretence, no affectation of not caring. Crooked Cranes sings as would be sung at the moment of impact, before hindsight catches up and the clarity of tidy resolution. The songwriting in the EP lies in the urgency—its refusal to tidy the pain into verse, but give it in its rough, unfinished state. At its most basic, This is Only a Test is an image of fumbling through love, loss, and flight with defenses dropped in the moment. The songwriting comparisons aren’t thematic—they’re an image of an engaged mind, spiraling and careening forward, looking for something that makes the mess worthwhile. In its mistakes, its mess, and its agonizing-to-behere honesty, the EP accesses something very, very human.