Written by Anika Maculangan Founded in 2022 by Sam Slater, Italy Jones, Aron Farkas, and Jack Von Bloeker in Mission Viejo, California, five-piece skramz band Clay Birds is onto their sophomore EP, a separation of vanity, a palimpsest which gleams with dissonance and introspection, intimate as it is liberating. separation of vanity begins with “an intuition of morality”, a track that immediately sets you into a dirty basement, sweat flying from slamming bodies of a mosh pit, the heaviness of stomping feet on broken floorboards. The song carries a weathered subtlety, like a memory half-sung on a battered Telecaster; its bitter, wistful texture echoing the kind of late-night conversation you’d only dare to have beneath a spray-painted-over bridge, when it’s too dark to see each other’s faces but too honest to look away. As the EP progresses, Clay Birds’ sound is revealed not in nuance but in imperfection, sharp energy that’s like being pushed off a bike or your heart racing through the seams of a t-shirt. Every song is peeling away, a slash into the emotional undertow of being young. The tracks pose as an unraveling, taking you through the architecture of what has come undone. Each song arrives unearthed, dismantled, plunging you into its entropy. The music doesn’t come out as complete or polished. Rather, it seeps through, and invites people to bask in the mess through the acceptance of being unfinished together. What you hear is reminiscent of cut-short and picked-up conversations from venues, voice calls, and basement shows. It’s built with the rigid kind of faith that only exists between people who’ve gone through the same pain and somehow ended up at the show. Spoken in glances and gestures, in the nods around a circle pit, in the soothing silence when the set ends, it’s a project that insists: you’re not alone. These are not songs sung over a crowd but with them, music which depends on the listener’s openness to feel, to shatter, to mend in tandem. There’s a very real sense of every single line having been written in a room full of friends screaming the same thing at once, each of them taking the words because they’d written them themselves. The EP is not simply a recording of hardship; it’s a recording of being close enough to another person’s agony that it becomes your own. It’s not catharsis by distance but radical empathy. Even with its rough-around-the-edges demeanor, this is hardly a “noise” EP as you might anticipate. The language itself is the heft in this case, pulling on you instead of shoving away, evoking the spirit of unity. This culture of sharedness is at the center of the band. On their Bandcamp, there is a short sentence that reads: “Birds of the same feather flock together.” It’s a slogan, naturally, but something more. It reads as if it’s a manifesto. Clay Birds traces back to a more wide-ranging Gen Z DIY skramz ecosystem where communality is at the backbone of everything. Whether it’s through collaboration or collective effort, it’s in these relationships that the scene is rich, not competitive but cooperative. Pilfer their overlaps with bands like Composition Booklet and Kiowa, who the band shares members with. Not to mention their joint release with Knumears, where the sky meets you. By the same token, there is their commitment to DIY. Take for example their 2022 cover of iwrotehaikusaboutcannibalisminyouryearbook. The clip is didactic in its austerity: a cymbal to which a microphone is duct-taped, an unadorned, visual paean to the spartan aesthetic that characterizes the scene. DIY in this instance isn’t about utility but about authenticity, about not sanding off what makes the music sincere. Although considered one of the younger generations within the scene, Clay Birds continues a philosophy that has defined the scene for decades now: vulnerability, urgency, presence. It’s this devotion that brings their music back to haunt you long after the final note has disappeared, leaving not just sound, but the sense of something real, something felt behind. A band that challenges you to listen with more than your ears, but with whatever is still left of you that aches. Their cries form not chaos but concord, a solemn pact that, despite everything, the kids are alright. Why do I like it? Because it allows me to think out loud, and more importantly, do so alongside others. Not to be heard, but seen. Which reminds me — this is what life is all about. SUPPORT THE ART & THE ARTIST: