Chloe Elms – Days Go By EP

Every so often a submission to the ROMBO Instagram Open Call stops the scroll for the right reasons. Chloe Elms’ four-track EP is one of those moments.

Stream Days Go By in full.

Chloe Elms makes music that already feels lived in. Her second EP, released on the young Manchester label RPMA Recordings, moves with the quiet assurance of an artist who has been carrying these songs around for some time before deciding they were ready. The four tracks never strain for attention. Instead they settle into a warm, self-produced electronic world that feels personal without ever becoming confessional in the obvious way.

The record begins with The Valley, a soothing piece built on gentle percussion loops, soft synth textures and the occasional crisp kick that arrives like a sudden breath of clarity. Elms’ voice drifts through it all with the kind of natural intimacy that comes from years of writing and producing on her own terms. You hear her long-standing curiosity for global percussion and wider genre exploration without the music ever feeling like a checklist.

Keep Calling is the track she points to as the heart of the project. Summery keys and repeating vocal loops sit over a driving rhythm that somehow balances the weight of homesickness and family responsibility with the simple pleasure of moving on a dancefloor. Manchester pianist and singer Kemani Anderson adds keys and bass here and on the following cut, giving both songs an extra layer of live presence.

I Wonder When carries the memory of a 2019 disco demo called Wonder. What started life as one thing has been patiently reworked into something that now breathes with old-school electronic warmth, multiple vocal layers and a new melodic line that feels completely at home in the present.

The closing Palm Trees (Edit) shifts the energy again. Snappy breakbeat hats and liquid drum-and-bass undertow open the way for Elms’ ethereal lead vocal and guest bars from vocalist and DJ RAMO before everything resolves into a comforting sine-bass glow.

Born in Essex and now based in Manchester, Elms is a self-taught singer-songwriter, guitarist and producer whose sound was shaped early by her mother’s soul and R&B, her father’s house and electronic records, and her grandfather’s life as a professional drummer. Her 2021 debut EP Oblique already showed the same interest in soft jungle textures and curious melodies. Outside the studio she quietly runs Loose Theories, a small not-for-profit platform that creates performance and networking space for emerging artists. RPMA Recordings, founded this year by Matthew Krysko as a home for community-minded electronic and genre-fluid projects, feels like the natural next step.

Days Go By does not announce itself with grand gestures. It simply arrives, well made and sincere, and stays with you long after the last track fades. In a week where we sift through dozens of submissions, this is the kind of record that reminds you why we keep listening.

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Days Go By is out now.

Listen: Spotify

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