Reetoxa Lets the Sea Into the Crater on Double A Side 2 (Akaroa / Erica And The Stars)

Reetoxa is the Melbourne project of Jason McKee, a Frankston songwriter who spent three decades stacking songs before the records arrived. The name came out of recovery rooms. The first album, Pines Salad, landed in March 2025 with producer Simon Moro and a band that already sounded hired for permanence: James Ryan on guitar, Kit Riley on bass, Peter Marin on drums. Soliloquy followed in March 2026 as a twenty-six track double album with the Budapest Orchestra written into the larger rooms. Double A Side 2 (Akaroa / Erica And The Stars) is the quieter next move. Released on 10 September 2026, it lifts two of those songs out of the archive, records them again as a pair, and adds karaoke versions that leave the arrangements standing without a narrator.

Akaroa Harbour, on Banks Peninsula, is a drowned volcano. The cone rose, wore down, and the sea walked in until the crater became a long inlet with a town on its edge. That is the geography under the first song, and it is also how the song itself arrived. McKee first heard the title in a dream during a stretch of confinement and grief after his mother Bobbie died. He wrote the name down wrong. Years later a New Zealand cruise was forced into the harbour by weather. On the beach the melody came back. The place that saved the song is a collapsed mountain filled with water. Once you know that, the EP stops sounding like a pairing of two pretty titles and starts sounding like a study of what remains after something gives way.

Akaroa works that idea in small, circular motions. The opening is slightly theatrical. A ghost in the mirror. A figure called Mr. Cow. Kids appearing where they should not. Then the song settles into a dune, a stair, a beach, and a mantra that refuses the laboratory. “These are the signs I saw / I don’t understand science at all.” The hook is not a thesis. It is a decision to trust what the body already knows. “She knows” keeps returning until it behaves like tide rather than chorus. When the vocal opens on “show your soul,” the arrangement widens with it, then folds back into sand and feet and that odd closing image of the best fish swimming free while the singer stands there “like a vegan munching on a fin.” The line is funny until it is not. It is a picture of standing next to the thing you cannot join. Two hands together make a beach complete, the lyric says, which is a tender thought and a lonely one. The production, cut at The Avenue in Cheltenham with Moro producing, mixing and mastering, and Luke Crouch engineering, keeps the band close to that shoreline. Terry Hart’s piano, Ryan’s guitar, Riley’s bass and Marin’s drums do not storm the song. They rock it the way water rocks a hull.

Erica And The Stars leaves the harbour. If Akaroa is the crater after the sea has entered, this one is lift-off from the rim. McKee has said the song arrived during a psychiatric crisis and that the orchestra he heard in his head is the orchestra on the record. The Budapest sessions are not decoration. They are the temperature of the track. “I’m not gonna fall / I’m going to float” is the first contract. The voices will not win. The real world is declined with a calm that is almost polite. “I don’t know how / But everything will be okay” sits in the centre like a promise made without evidence, which is often the only kind that works when the ground is gone. Later the stars melt and the company is “all blown up,” and the spaceship becomes a room where nobody has to conform or grow up. Jessica McPherson-Riley’s backing vocal keeps the air occupied so the drift never becomes empty. The song could have turned cartoon. It does not, because the arrangement understands suspension as structure. Pads and strings hold a wide horizon. Rhythm stays light. The vocal does not argue with the voices. It outlasts them by changing altitude.

The karaoke versions are the most revealing extra. Without McKee’s voice, Akaroa becomes the harbour itself: circular chords, a rhythm that behaves like wash, a centre that opens and then retreats. Erica And The Stars becomes almost uterine, arpeggios orbiting a gravity you can feel but not name. These are not bonus instrumentals for a pub machine. They are proof that the atmosphere was already in the writing. The words gave the songs a face. The tracks underneath already knew the weather.

What gives this EP weight is the selection. Soliloquy is a life document, crowded and long. Double A Side (Strong / Truce) had already tested the format of two equal songs with no leftover side. This second pairing isolates the two pieces that live furthest from pub-rock muscle and lets them keep each other company. One song finishes on a beach that only appeared because a ship was blown off course. The other finishes in a craft that refuses to land. Together they describe the same instinct from two directions. Stay close to the water that filled the ruin. Or leave the planet that asked too much. McKee does not tidy either impulse. He just gives both of them a finished shape, then steps back so you can hear the rooms without him.

The takeaway is simple enough to hold. Reetoxa has spent two albums proving he can fill a stage. Double A Side 2 proves he can also empty one and still leave presence in the air.

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Double A Side 2 (Akaroa / Erica And The Stars) is out now.

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