Pure Bliss, Forever: Sydney Ross Mitchell’s EP One Year Later.
One year on, Pure Bliss Forever still feels untethered from the moment it arrived — a debut that carried itself with rare certainty from the start. There was an intimacy that made the record feel familiar, as though the songs were remembering you as much as you were discovering them. These songs never rushed to prove themselves; they unfolded like memories, steady and sure, waiting to be heard. That’s why a year later they still feel alive: ‘Wherever We’re Going’ still glows in its red-light haze, ‘The Edge’ still aches like a half-finished summer, and the title track still lands with the weight of a truth that feels written in your bones. It’s the rare debut that lives up to its name — daring not just to last, but to believe in forever.
The first track, ‘Wherever We’re Going,’ isn’t about the party so much as the afterglow—the kind that only finds you once you’ve slipped outside of it, when the real spark is the quiet thrill of catching someone’s gaze across the noise. Mitchell paints the night in motion: Holloway Drive rolling out beneath them, a hand drifting through the sunroof, the red-light glow catching everything in its spell. Its magic is in its fragility—the questions that surface when the night goes quiet: “Is it all in my head? / Am I hurting myself? / …Should I be dancing with you or dancing with someone who wants me?” And how they hold you between abandon and ache, carrying the fleeting drive into memory as if the whole night existed only for it. The secret the night will always hold.
But softness gives way to unease in ‘Sting,’ a song that starts close: lipstick on glass, breath shared in a kiss. Even in those tender moments, you can feel the bruise starting to form. Mitchell threads desire with unease in images that sting rather than soothe—a spider trapped in a jar, helpless and suffocating, caught between mercy and cruelty. It plays like a metaphor for a love you can’t quite let go of: too fragile to survive, too strong to release. The hypnotic refrain circles on itself again and again, obsession collapsing into ache until it stings, like holding on long past the point you know you should let go.
‘My Heart Is a Bloodhound’ rips into relentlessness, running on instinct and chasing love like a scent it can’t let go of. “Once I get a little bit, I’ll follow you down” isn’t just a lyric, it’s the song’s pulse — love as pursuit, hunger as devotion. Desire snarls through the track, circling intimacy with the urgency of something feral, the bite sharp but delivered like a raw confession. It’s fierce and consuming, thrilling in its own chaos. The kind of song that leaves you breathless even as it devours.
With ‘Fast Cars, Faster Horses,’ written for the grandfathers she lost, Mitchell imagines heaven in their image, where hallelujahs sit alongside cigarettes and Coca-Cola. The song opens restless and human, Mitchell singing, “I think I’m losing my patience, barefoot on the pavement,” a line that feels less like a passing moment and more like a prophecy: the weariness of life pressed up against the hope of something beyond. From there, the chorus blooms like both confession and hallelujah. It’s expansive yet deeply intimate, a vision of eternity stitched from memory and vice, love and loss, longing to feel it all before the end. In Mitchell’s hands, heaven isn’t a destination so much as a hope—fast cars, faster horses, and the ache to touch it while you’re still alive.
‘Altitude’ feels like the moment the record looks up and realizes how far apart two people can be. First released in 2021 but now breathed into new life, it reshapes memory as landscape, setting love against the thin air of the Sierras, where altitude pulls it thinner with every climb—fragile as breath itself. The song lingers in that space between presence and absence, captured in the ache of “I feel you here in this room / But we’re at different altitudes”. Love here is breathtaking and vulnerable, faltering not because it disappears, but because it thins in air too scarce to survive. Yet even in that tension, ‘Altitude’ holds on to a quiet beauty: the sense that memory, like a mountain range, can be overwhelming in its distance and still close enough to touch.
‘The Edge’ pulls the frame back in, trading the sweep of sky for the close-up of one summer, one bed, one unfinished love. Mitchell sings through the tension of almosts: “We weren’t in love / But we were pretty damn close,” and lets the story unfold in lies told just to stay close, kisses that lasted until they couldn’t, and the fragile belief that these moments were enough to hold it all together. Its ache comes from that restraint—the way she tries not to pry, not to search for hidden meanings, even as memory keeps pulling her back. What makes it so moving is the closeness of someone half yours, the way memory turns fleeting nights into entire seasons; in this song, it is always July.
‘Forward To The Kill’ is desire at its most dangerous, a song where seduction and destruction blur until they’re impossible to separate. Mitchell writes with unflinching intimacy: “You have eyes just like a baby animal, and all my fear / That you might hurt me is replaced with knowing just how bad you will,” turning vulnerability into inevitability. The track builds on tension, with whisper-close vocals and imagery that lives between sweetness and ruin, capturing the pull of a love you know will undo you but you lean into anyway. What makes it linger is the thrill of surrender—the way she renders recklessness not just tempting but fated, as if undoing yourself was always part of the story.
And then comes the title track, the line the record had been circling all along: “I want pure bliss forever, I want heaven on earth / I wanted you, for whatever it’s worth.” It doesn’t land like a passing lyric, but like prayer and demand in the same breath—the center of gravity everything else pulls from. Where earlier songs blurred intimacy and ache, here Mitchell strips everything down to the heart: a longing that won’t loosen, a desire that refuses to fade. It lands like something final, the kind of line you could imagine etched into stone, left behind as proof of what you wanted most.