Silver Gore filter electronic, indie-pop, folk-rock through a battered kaleidoscope. Dogs In Heaven, the London-based duo’s debut EP, is dark and dazzlingly beautiful, wringing moments of triumph and euphoria from dark thoughts and sepia-filtered genre experiments; the result is one of the year’s most idiosyncratic and deeply felt records – an indelible arrival for the duo of Ethan P. Flynn, an accomplished solo performer in his own right, and newcomer Ava Gore.

Dogs In Heaven’s unique palette – baggy breakbeats and shoegaze guitars, undulating synths and walls of sound that appear as if from nowhere – is hyperactive and cathartic, but its hard-won brightness is a direct response to a period of personal strife that Ava went through in 2022, ahead of the record’s creation. “I’m a massive music fan but I couldn’t even listen to music, I was in such a dark place,” says Ava.

Dogs In Heaven feels its way through some relatively shadowy corners of society and the human psyche – touching on the nihilistic feeling of the 2020s and wryly nodding at ideas of conquest and British identity – and the tactile, high-saturation gloss of these songs belies emotional centres that are often thorny or difficult to reckon with. Ava points to one particular motif – ”Smile though your heart is breaking” – as being particularly representative of the EP’s spirit as a whole. “That’s the vibe – smiling through the tears, putting on a show,” she says, “putting on a brave face, even though you’re crumbling.”

The duo started Silver Gore in 2022, almost by accident: Ava had been playing drums in Ethan’s solo band, and one night after rehearsal they decided to start writing songs together. That evening, they sowed the seeds for synth-pop earworm “All The Good Men”, with Dogs In Heaven’s grand, atmospheric final track “25 Metres” arriving in 2023.

Silver Gore are always trying to bottle a feeling in its most potent form, and as such take an instinctive approach to production and lyricism that translates to a raw immediacy in the finished product. “We always set out to make a song that speaks to how we’re feeling in a moment. Every decision is then based around that emotion whether it’s the lyrics or the drum sound or anything else,” Ava says of their sessions, which can last until dawn. “We try to document it exactly how it is in the moment and finish it then and there so we don’t have to pretend to dip back into specific feelings.”

Although Ethan has established himself as a prolific collaborator in his own right – racking up credits alongside Nia Archives and FKA Twigs, to name a few – Silver Gore feels like a different beast. “With Ava, we can both actually do what we want – no one is working for anyone else, it’s not an existing project that has a vibe – we’re continually sculpting the vibe,” says Ethan. “Stylistically, we just want to do everything that we love. “For me, it’s all about stripping the cultural context of existing music and thinking about why certain frequencies and rhythms affect me – taking a mathematical approach, rather than thinking about how things have been done before.”

Silver Gore’s approach to style is, perhaps, best embodied by lead single “Forever”, which drifts between earnest acoustic folk, swells of punishing post-rock, and bulbous, chugging indie-pop. The track has an innate warmth that sits at odds with its lyrical core: “‘Forever’ is kind of about feeling silenced, and about bad things happening quietly, and not being allowed to speak out about them,” says Ava. Feeling diminished is a recurring theme on the EP: opening track “A Scar’s Length” is the song which most explicitly deals with Ava’s bout of depression, but it wrings hopefulness from the wreckage. “It’s kind of using that and putting it in this triumphant song – it was just a cathartic way out of that,” she says.

Silver Gore seek out that kind of change throughout Dogs In Heaven – never more so than on the ballad “Celestial Intervention”, on which they dream of some kind of cataclysmic event that might shake the world out of its nihilistic stupor. In a perverse way, it’s a more hopeful idea than “smile though your heart is breaking”: it’s a suggestion that a better world is and should be possible – if chaos is going to reign, we should at least get some beauty out of it.