From the moment I heard his Monstercat debut, I knew that Puppet wasn’t going to be your typical run-of-the-mill electro house producer. Though the Chicago native had a rich history with electro (listen to his single “BRAT” as Art Thieves here), “Scribble” made it evident that this new project would be much more geared toward an alt-rock sound, evidenced by the punk vocals provided by EDEN (who was then known as The Eden Project).

Fast-forward to Puppet’s first EP release, Soft Spoken, and those thoughts rang more true than ever before. As said by our own editor-in-chief, the EP was “wonderfully diverse” and featured a span of stylistic approaches, from ambient to progressive & electro house to straight-up electronic rock.

Simply said, I didn’t think Puppet could make a body of work better than Soft Spoken… That is, until he released Fear Is Fleeting just a few days ago.

For the first time in the producer’s history, Puppet has finally found a sound that he can stick to. Fear Is Fleeting is almost entirely engulfed in indie dance, with the producer completely dropping electro house. In fact, every single that was put out ahead of the EP’s release – “I’m Here,” “To Be Alive” and “Killing Giants” – fell into this genre. Because of this, I was initially worried that Puppet was just riding off the success of “Enough Is Enough” with series of copy-paste releases. Thankfully, I was wrong yet again.

While Fear Is Fleeting does have a general vibe to it, this piece alone makes the body of work a lot more cohesive than Soft Spoken was. Even so, Puppet leaves a decent amount of room for experimentation.

Out of this comes two of my favorite tracks tracks on the EP, “Just You” and “Play Pretend.” The first, respectively, is heavily organic, fueled by piano & acoustic guitar and cheesy lyrics about “liking girls and stuff” (according to Pierce Fulton himself), while the second is much more mechanical, with Puppet singing through a vocoder about much deeper topics, including regretfulness and heartbreak. Though these two couldn’t sound any more opposite, binds them together impressively, with one directly following the other.

I could go on and on about the depth of the work that is Fear Is Fleeting I’ll keep it short and say this: though there are some not-so-surprising moments on this EP, Puppet has crafted what is easily his most well-balanced and solidly put together project to date. To say I’m a fan would simply be an understatement.

Support on all platforms: Monstercat.lnk.to/FearIsFleeting