First Time / Alone, Greg Mendez’s new EP and first release with Dead Oceans, came together in late summer and early fall of 2023; the songs here appear in the order in which they were written, recorded straight to four-track in the small spare room of his West Philadelphia apartment. It’s a four song arc, a spectral passageway, one brief and fluid body of work that hangs together from the mournful opening of “Mountain Dew Hell” to the pitched-up vocals on “Pain Meds,” a tiny song floundering in the enormity of grief. The experience of listening through is like waking up from a half-remembered dream, a shadow in the corner of the room, a strange solitude, a temporal New York autumn with gray skies and naked trees. But while the release is sparse and spontaneous, it’s tactile and consuming, a glimpse into the beautiful, lonely worlds that live in the core of a Greg Mendez song.