“Severed Logic”

At a Pinegrove concert last December, singer Evan Stephens-Hall explained to the crowd that writing the songs on Cardinal challenged him to love more. His bandmate, Nandi Rose Plunkett, who stood beside him, understands this creative challenge well. She uses her synth-pop project Half Waif to probe her own relationships, and in “Severed Logic,” off the forthcoming EP *form/*a, Plunkett digs into romantic partnership with unflinching self-awareness.

She opens the song with a warning to current partner (“My mood is a pendulum/I don’t think you can handle it)” that dissolves into a swirl of fluttering thumps and fuzzy rumbles. “Severed Logic” is a song bathed in balmy sounds but filled with promises and bare facts that won’t necessarily be pretty. Plunkett admits to the perils of her own fallibility (“Will you listen when I’m talking in my severed logic?/If you agree, you open yourself up to something tragic”) and the finite lifespan of love (“If you would, then I could stand the aging”). Still, Plunkett concludes in “Severed Logic,” love is a risk worth taking because, after all, to be a half is inevitably to seek becoming part of a whole.