Brookelen Explores Icarus and Faith on Dark Side of the Sun EP

Los Angeles indie rock musician Brookelen has released her third EP, Dark Side of the Sun, out now on Soliloquy Records. Its six songs, “Omen,” “Enemy,” “Undo,” “Hide,” “Shadow,” and “Skeptic,” deal with religious trauma, queerness, sexuality, and independence, and they keep returning to the same images: angels and demons, Genesis, omens, and the myth of Icarus. Alongside the release, she has shared a video for “Shadow,” the EP’s fifth track.

The title is a deliberate contradiction. The sun is the brightest thing in the solar system, and the EP asks what sits on the side of it no one sees. Brookelen uses that idea to stand for the parts of a person kept out of view: ego, secrecy, shame, doubt, and love that didn’t last. “‘Dark side of the sun’ is about looking directly at the parts of ourselves we’d rather keep hidden,” she says.

The EP was recorded live, so the breaths, swells, and rough edges stay in the takes rather than being cleaned up. That approach suits songs that move between indie rock, orchestral arrangements, post-rock textures, and the closeness of folk. Claire Morison of GOON engineered the sessions, and Pearce Gronek, who has worked with Exum, Hudson Freeman, and Paper Lady, handled additional production and mixing.

“Shadow” is the clearest statement of the EP’s Icarus thread. Brookelen describes it as a song about ego death, written around the story of the boy whose wings melt when he flies too close to the sun. “It’s a reminder to find the balance. Both yin and yang,” she says. The song sets a close, quiet vocal against fuzzed-out guitars, a pairing she says she’s always drawn to.

The video carries the myth into Los Angeles itself, moving between images of heaven and the city’s streets. Brookelen calls it her own Odyssey. “I wanted to capture something honest about living in the city of angels through the song and accompanying video,” she says.

Two earlier singles fill out the picture. “Omen,” the EP’s opener, came after Brookelen learned that an ex-boyfriend had gotten engaged. She calls it her “witch-rocky anthem” for following warning signs back toward self-actualization, independence, and queerness, and its video features Jessicka Addams of Jack Off Jill. Audiofuzz, a music blog, found the track “heavy, theatrical, and emotionally direct, but it does not wallow.” “Hide,” the first single, took its cues from Alice in Chains and Hole, and she counts it as her most collaborative work so far.

Brookelen grew up moving from state to state but considers Virginia home, and it’s where she first picked up the violin. Self-taught, she moved to Los Angeles looking for collaborators and a creative community. Her debut EP, Time to Go, leaned on melancholy string arrangements to write about closing old chapters. Going, Going, Gone went heavier, taking on sobriety, domestic violence, and mental health through guitar feedback and orchestration.

Dark Side of the Sun is her first release with Soliloquy, an independent label and publisher Jacob Kolb started to document the Nashville underground indie scene he came up in. The label has since grown to work with artists rooted in local scenes around the country, with recent releases from Anna Grace Odom and behn.

Brookelen will play the new songs live in Los Angeles and on the East Coast through November. Across all six tracks, the idea she keeps coming back to is the one in her own description of the record: healing as being seen, not as becoming someone else.