There’s a version of grief they don’t put on the syllabus. Everyone knows the five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, but knowing the map doesn’t make the terrain any less brutal when you’re actually in it. I went through a breakup a few years back with my high school boyfriend, the one I followed to Manhattan, the one I lived with for three years in an apartment that smelled like his laundry detergent and felt like home until it suddenly didn’t. And the thing nobody tells you about grief is how disorganized it actually is. You don’t move through the stages in order. You get angry, then you bargain at 2am, then you wake up fine for three days straight and think you’re done, then something stupid like a playlist or a coffee order sends you back to the floor. I remember standing in a pharmacy updating an emergency contact form and just… stopping. That one small piece of paperwork hit me harder than any conversation had. The relationship was really over when I changed that number. That’s the achingly familiar territory Ellis King maps across All That Comes After, her sophomore EP. Five tracks representing five chapters and she wrote every one of them in real time while it was still happening to her. That kind of raw access to your own grief, while you’re inside it, takes a particular kind of courage.
The EP was written during what Ellis calls a small pocket of calm between storms. A relationship was ending at the same time her career was taking off. She traveled to Sydney to make it with producer Alex Burnett whose credits include Thelma Plum and Alison Wonderland and she describes landing in a city where she knew no one: “there’s something about being in a shitty hotel room with nothing else to do. I don’t know anyone. It was a blank canvas, and I just sat and wrote.” God, I love that. Just a woman alone with her feelings and nothing standing between her and the work. That combination tends to produce something real. And that’s exactly what this EP is.
If you love Maisie Peters’ sharp, emotionally intelligent pop or Gracie Abrams’ quiet devastation, this EP is going to wreck you in the best way. Ellis describes it as “exactly what the title implies, it’s about what follows the end of something big, all while approaching a new decade of life; examining my own struggles up to this point and, finally, moving forward, finding love, tranquility, and structure again amidst the mess.” Each track a different stage of a grief she didn’t see coming. Let’s get into it.
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Opening track ‘Nosedive’ drops you in without warning, Ellis’s voice holding steady against the guitar while she takes apart what it actually cost her to stay. The lyric that stopped me cold: “I’d set my contrast to dull / He said my lustre made him feel small.” That line right there. How many of us girls have done exactly that? – Making yourself duller so someone else can feel brighter is the least romantic thing you can do to yourself. Ellis just documents it, which somehow makes it hit harder. Her delivery is controlled and a little devastating, like she’s recounting something she’s finally made peace with.
And listen, the production on ‘Nosedive’ earns its place from the first measure. ” Grass is greener / where you water it / and we bled each other dry “ arrives without melodrama and Ellis delivers the line with the kind of calm you only access once the crying is over. The chorus refrain – “the world spins madly on / and so do I” – feels less like a metaphor and more like a simple statement of perseverance. She kept moving. The world kept moving. What I love about Ellis as a songwriter is she trusts you to find your own way around the feeling without over-explaining it.
‘Emergency Contact’ is where the EP hits its most tender exposed territory. The premise alone hits somewhere deep: updating your emergency contact from your ex to your mom, that one small piece of paperwork that makes the whole thing official. I’m telling you, that specific detail lands harder than any dramatic lyric could. “Sometimes things will never get better / no matter how much trust you place in a man’s hands / if you have to repeat yourself over and over / they’ll probably never understand.” That verse is doing serious emotional work. Ellis told us she “had a big break-up, a big life event,” and you can feel that real-time rawness in every syllable here.
‘Emergency Contact’ has a gentle country warmth to its arrangement that almost tricks you into forgetting what she’s actually lost, because Ellis is singing about a version of home she can’t go back to. Pause. Because that framing is everything. “I’m proud of myself for leaving / something I knew was already doomed / you had to wait to see fire / but I already tasted the fumes” is one of the most quietly confident breakup declarations I’ve heard in recent memory. She wasn’t surprised by the ending. She’d been smelling the smoke for a while. And the decision to put mom’s number there instead? That’s the real closure. Practical and just a little heartbreaking.
On ‘Hold My Breath,’ Ellis goes somewhere she hasn’t gone yet on the EP. Where ‘Nosedive’ and ‘Emergency Contact’ dealt with the immediate aftermath, this one sits inside the grief of what could have been. “Maybe we could’ve been / something to blossom / but the fruit fell from the tree / and it went rotten.” She’s mourning the relationship that was and the one that never got the chance to bloom and that distinction matters truly matters here. She then pivots completely: “you’ve been going through a lot of change / but only you can rearrange / the mess inside your home.” That’s Ellis drawing a line. She spent time trying to understand him, maybe even trying to fix him, and this is the moment she hands that back. His chaos belongs to him. The resolve in her delivery when she sings “I won’t hold my breath” carries a kind of emotional authority that says everything without saying anything more.
‘fitymi’ shifts the energy by snapping into something brighter and more propulsive than anything else on the record – and after the emotional weight of the first three tracks, the shift is everything. Fake it till you make it but make it a whole emotional philosophy. “I’ve been stopped at every red light / seeing every single thing as a sign” captures that exhausting hypervigilance of someone still recovering from chaos. And then: “time is like a healer and the future looks like now / came back up for air when I was ready to drown / now my failures look like blips in the life timeline.” That progression from barely breathing to finally surfacing is the turning point of the whole EP. The fact that it’s wrapped in the most danceable production on this EP is honestly genius.
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‘The Blueprint’ closes the EP with the quiet confidence of someone who finally has the real thing in her hands after too many imitations and the production settle into a warmth that feels like the first time something actually fits. Real talk, this track feels like that specific exhale you take when you realize you’re actually okay now. “All those other guys / were reproductions and spies / tied hastily with a ribbon / and sold as bona fide.” Ellis’s phrasing here is so good it’s almost offensive. Every knockoff relationship you’ve sat through while waiting for the real thing? Wrapped up in one perfectly constructed verse. And the moment she sings “I found the blueprint” feels like one chapter closing and another beginning.
“Now you’ve moved in / we sit with the moon / drinking our wine from one glass / not two” is the image the whole EP has been building toward. Two people sharing one glass, and everything that means. “Open the doors / this love knows no ceiling / you love all my flaws / and you know how I’m feeling” is Ellis King at her most generous, and she’s earned every word of it. She describes this record as exploring “how you grow and evolve for better or for worse trying to find your old self and new self” and by the time ‘The Blueprint’ arrives that search is over. She documents the whole damn journey with the kind of precision and emotional intelligence that makes you want to sit with this EP on a Sunday morning and let it do its work.
I eventually moved out of that Manhattan apartment on a Tuesday, changed my emergency contact at the pharmacy on a Wednesday, and cried in a Trader Joe’s on a Thursday because grief doesn’t follow a schedule. But I got through all five stages in my own chaotic order. Ellis King wrote this EP while she was still inside hers, which takes a kind of nerve most people don’t have. “The songs dive into the messy feelings that come with the stages of grief,” she told us, “there’s love and loss, but also confusion, frustration, and moments of clarity.” All That Comes After captures every one of those moments, and by the time ‘The Blueprint’ closes it out, you realize the whole record was always about what you find on the other side of it. Ellis found it. And damn, she made it sound good.
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