Night Swimming are a Bath and Bristol-based five-piece drawn to the darker nuances of human experience, and ‘Melting, Sometimes Bleeding’ is the sound of a band who have worked out exactly how to channel that.

Recorded live to tape across five summer days at Middlefarm Studios in Devon, the surrounding moorland providing an appropriately haunting backdrop, the EP was produced by Peter Miles and mastered by Slowdive’s Simon Scott, and the pedigree shows in every detail.

‘Nothing Safe Is Technicolour’ opens proceedings with real purpose. Vocalist Meg Jones has described the song as being about opening yourself up to love while bracing for the possibility of being hurt. It’s a precise emotional territory, and the music matches it perfectly: sloping bass lines, layered guitars, Jones’s vocal hovering above the instrumentation with an intimacy that pulls you in rather than keeping you at arm’s length.

‘Submarine’ is the EP’s most hypnotic moment, a gauzy, drifting piece that trades shimmer for something drier and more numb, while ‘Poison Berry’ turns the lens inward on relationship deadlocks, its rhythmic pulse building tension without ever breaking into melodrama. ‘Hope and Wavering’ offers a breath of space before ‘Dark Clouds’ closes things out, cementing itself as a fan favourite and an easy highlight: atmospheric and enveloping in equal measure.

Drawn from the lineage of Cocteau Twins, The Cure and Slowdive while feeling very much of the present moment, Night Swimming have made an EP that rewards repeat listening. One of the finest dream-pop releases of 2026.