There’s a definitive moment when you realize a storm is coming. It follows a sudden shift in atmosphere; the wind conjures itself up, while the temperature bakes, before a sharp plummet into cold and jarring, quiet stillness. Perhaps in that anticipation, billowing clouds appear on the horizon, readying to break upon the earth. Those ominous clouds — the stuff of storybooks and bad omens — are called thunderheads.
In the same way nature’s counterpart forewarns of dreariness and thunderous disruption, indie musician Kinji’s newest EP Thunderhead starts as the calm before the storm, only to break open, laid bare to the elements, oozing out luscious, melancholic aural landscapes. Something of a musical wunderkind, the six-track effort (the artist’s second of the year) is solely written, produced, performed and mixed by Cooper Kinjiro Sifert, stage name Kinji. Kinji may be relatively fresh to the scene, dropping out of the University of Northern Iowa two years ago to pursue music, but he seems to already be finding sonic synergy from impressive music peers. Grammy-nominated music producer and engineer Joey Messina-Doerning mastered the EP, putting Thunderhead alongside mk.gee’s debut album and Kate Bollinger tracks on Messina-Doerning’s resume. They feel perfectly in concert with each other in their vibey downtempo nostalgia.
Though fitting most neatly in the intimate bedroom-pop tradition of one-man bands, with its vocal doubling and drum loops, each track has an ethereal expansiveness due to its sheer depth of layered production. There’s a bit of Bon Iver’s pastoral imagery and spirited self-harmonized choruses, muddled with the atmospheric and lo-fi production stylings of ’90s DIY darlings like Broadcast and Yo La Tengo. The album is also evocative of the slowed-down psychedelic R&B musical hangouts of modern indie-artists Hether and Brad Stank.
Kinji nods to this aesthetic both sonically and visually, with an accompanying crafted world that deepens the ambience. Across social media, each song promotion features shaky-cam slices of open fields, cloudy skies and abandoned houses. Occasionally, the artist makes an appearance as a rugged time traveler, tied together by the imagery of a vintage wooden weather machine, perpetually stuck on the reading of “stormy” across time and space.
Kinji’s preoccupation with time takes on a narrative journey across the tracklist. “windburn” yearns for the subject to stay in the narrator’s life to “waste some more time,” encased in a cacophony of sound collage and rousing piano melodies. When standout “silas” rolls around, there’s no longer a wish to waste time, but a panicked desperation to “gain time,” before the verse’s backing spacey-synth cascades into a glittering allegro finish. Closing track “romp” finds the listener wrapped in twilight, aghast at where all the time went. But there’s a sense of homecoming at the end of the day — after all, “darling, the food’s still hot.”
As Thunderhead’s lyrics cope with the fickleness of time, the instrumental drives at a destination, with processional moments like the driving drumbeats of “metalmind” or the ticking clocks lurking in “pocketwatch.” Each track’s structure propels it forward, building up to a crescendo, breaking out into intricate minute-long instrumental interludes and patchworks of stitched-together sound as the sky breaks open. Kinji succeeds in getting the listener to wait, with baited breath, for the thunder to strike.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s January 2026 issue.
