ear – Ne Plus Ultra

New York duo ear, Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan, return with “Ne Plus Ultra”, their first new music since last September’s self-released debut album The Most Dear and the Future.

The lyrics do some of the talking. “Ne Plus Ultra” is built around a sense of being stuck: wrong directions, luck as the only explanation, one plus one collapsing into one. The lyric “to resent what makes you stuck” sits at the centre of it, repeated back by both voices. Avtan’s verse traces a kind of ordinary dislocation, a bar, a car, seven years, money spent, and Paz threads through with something more fragmented underneath. The glitch-pop framing keeps it from settling into straightforward indie songwriting territory, the instrumental outro pulling away just as the lyric gets closest to a resolution it was never quite going to reach. I find that structural choice interesting: the song earns its title, “ne plus ultra” meaning the furthest point, the limit, and it behaves accordingly.