A Band That Outgrew Its Own Breakthrough

Cool Kids came out in 2013 and for a while was inescapable—that chiming guitar line, Sydney Sierota’s voice carrying a very specific kind of teenage longing over a hook simple enough to survive months of overplay. The Sierota siblings were teenagers themselves when they wrote it, which is either the most authentically perfect version of that feeling or a very skilled performance of one. Probably both.

The thing about Echosmith is they always had more range than their breakout suggested. Cool Kids is almost unfairly catchy for how wistful it is, but everything else on Talking Dreams had more texture—more introspective in places, more willing to sit with something unresolved. So when they disappeared for a while and resurfaced with the Inside A Dream EP in late 2017, I was genuinely curious which direction they’d push.

"Over My Head" answers that question. The synths are bigger and more confident, the drum production has a weight that wasn’t there on earlier records, and Sydney’s voice—still the instrument the whole thing is built around—sounds like she knows exactly what she’s doing now. The arrangement has matured without losing whatever made those early songs work. It doesn’t sound like a band straining to prove they’ve grown up. It sounds like they actually have.

Whether the full album can sustain that remains to be seen. For now "Over My Head" goes into the permanent rotation alongside things I actually return to, not just admire once and file away. The siblings who were too cool to know it—still figuring things out, still worth following.