Whatever She’s On Is Working

Adi Ulmansky goes by Adi, which is also the name of someone who sounds like she wandered out of a psilocybin haze and some minor-key electronics and decided, correctly, to just start making music about that. She’s Israeli, and she writes songs that sit in the specific register between numbed and painfully awake—a difficult place to operate from, an even more difficult place to make sound good.

The EP includes a track called Pink Pilz—Pink Mushroom—about depression and the medication that’s supposed to treat it. Not a protest song, not a recovery narrative: just the reality of it, the daily pharmaceutical arithmetic, the gap between what you’re told you should feel and what you actually feel. She described the record as fragile and revealing, built without losing the sarcasm and humor that make the hard stuff bearable to write at all. That balance is harder than it sounds. Most artists pick one mode—devastatingly sincere or hiding behind irony—and Adi manages both simultaneously, which is the whole thing.

The song Dreamin’ is softer than the rest, more floating, the kind of track that sounds like exactly what the title promises if the title means something in the vicinity of a state of consciousness you can’t quite hold onto. Whether that’s pharmaceutical, natural, or assisted by something that grows in a field somewhere—she’s been reasonably open about where her creative process tends to live—the music doesn’t sound impaired. It sounds deliberate. Slow and deliberate, like moving carefully through a familiar room in the dark.

Music made by someone who’s clearly trying to figure something out—not perform an emotion, not craft a relatable sentiment, but actually work through a thing—stays longer than the polished stuff. Adi sounds like she’s figuring something out. I’m happy to listen while she does.