Phoenix James has announced her forthcoming EP Teeth, a new six-track project arriving on May 27 via +1 Records. Co-produced alongside her frequent collaborator Abner Dennis, the EP is as much a story about intimacy as it is an embering introduction for the budding artist-producer born in Birmingham, AL, raised in Miami, and now based in New York City. With a journey so distinct, it’s only natural that her sound would parallel. The songs on Teeth are a dreamlike collage of alternative R&B and avant-pop, each chronicling a different stage of emotional unraveling and the craving for closeness so desperate that it cuts. Intimate, wounded, sensual, real; it’s the bite marks left behind after someone gets too close.

It’s a feeling that’s doused over Phoenix’s latest single ‘Hold On,’ a shadowy new preview of Teeth. Serving as the EP opener, ‘Hold On’ is a plea; a fight to save a relationship that feels like it’s slipping further through your fingers by the minute, and the resistance to letting go even when love starts to feel foreign.

‘Hold On’ opens the EP with a sense of emotional urgency and a plea to salvage something slipping away,” says Phoenix about the single. “It captures the resistance to letting go, even when love starts to feel unfamiliar. There’s vulnerability in the fight, and a quiet hope in the asking.”