Shearling Release an Album-Length EP, and Alex Kent Explains the Choice

Shearling, the project Alex Kent formed after Sprain dissolved, has released an EP titled Don’t Look At Me The Way a Dog Might Look At Your Leg. Its runtime sits close to that of a standard full-length, which makes the EP designation a deliberate decision rather than a clerical one.

Speaking with Beats Per Minute, Kent explained the reasoning. He described stepping back from an old rule of reserving only the strongest material for the longer records. A lot of what he and the rest of the group write, he said, would never fit into what he calls the main series of Shearling or Sprain instalments. Instead of discarding it, they wanted to put more music out. The EP gives that work somewhere to go, and it arrives looser and more immediate than the records around it.

It follows Kent’s album Motherfucker… and precedes a follow-up to Shearling’s first full-length, which is already underway. Placed between those anchor points, the EP reads as a working method rather than a side step: shorter cycles, less gatekeeping, more output. Kent has been touring the record in Europe, and the conversation around it touches on transgression, shame as a cultural force, and religious imagery, preoccupations that shape how the band presents itself. None of that is necessary to hear the EP, but it explains why a release of this size was treated as a statement.