Sydney Ross Mitchell - Cynthia EP (2026) Hi-Res

If, like me, you have felt void of a certain emotional depth within yourself in the five years since Phoebe Bridgers last released music, you’re in luck. Sydney Ross Mitchell is here to reopen that heartbreaking chasm.

The Skinny: Cynthia, the second EP from the Texan singer-songwriter via Disruptor Records, opens instantly in a place of magical yearning with its title track. Based on Mitchell’s real-life experience of coming into the orbit of a woman named Cynthia under perhaps unlikely circumstances, this sliding chance of fate sets the rest of the EP off on a spiralling sense of ethereality and introspection.

On a purely sonic level, the soft and dreamy folkish tones maintained throughout the eight tracks are more than enough to soothe and beguile the listener. But the testament to an EP like this is that it doesn’t allow you to fade away and block out the noise: instead, it gently coaxes you under its spell, wrapping its arms around and leaving you hanging on its every word.

This is the true strength of songs like ‘Big Boy Problems’ and ‘Queen of Homecoming’ – they can pass as familiar coming-of-age pop motions, but their resonance hits so much deeper into a visceral and pointedly physical place in the soul, whether you happen to be 17 years of age, 77, or anywhere in between.

To this end, it’s obvious that Cynthia is a body of work heavily rooted in the idea of womanhood. It might seem like a simplistic statement to make, but those deft lyrical and textural movements between love, loss, reckoning, and identity are things that hit the centre of the bullseye in terms of the feminine take on the music industry being witnessed right now.

Yet, at the end of the day, Mitchell is not the complete picture – and she is in no rush to arrive there, either. The currents which swirl in the singer’s life, which she has spoken so openly about in terms of spirituality and religion, permeate so pressingly through the EP that it creates the impression of someone who will never readily stop questioning who they are, all in the name of music.

The two closing tracks of ‘Dorothy’ and ‘May the Landing Come Softly’ exhibit this most plainly. Between lyrics like “I love you, I’m losing this fight/I love you, I’m running out of time,” and having dreams of going over guardrails without seatbelts on, the sense of giving over to whatever has plagued Mitchell in the past, before she ultimately lets go of it, is perhaps the most profound beacon to take away.

Cynthia is a masterful EP in its ability to hit the indie zeitgeist with a softly entrancing sound that the masses won’t help but fall head over heels for.

Despite this, its true mark of a star on the rise is the lyrics that feel all at once evisceratingly personal to the writer, but given to the world as the gift we didn’t know we needed. If the words of one human’s experience can send you into scenes of your own life without even seeing through the window, you know it’s something special.