King Pine “Running Out Of Future” (EP)

After twelve hundred gigs in five years, a musician can learn how to work a room—or become trapped inside what the room expects. James Hearne, the Austin songwriter and multi-instrumentalist behind King Pine, has apparently decided he has spent enough time being reasonable. On Running Out Of Future, his six-song EP arriving September 23, he trades the economics of the road for the dangerous luxury of following an idea past the point where anybody can play it live.

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That might sound like the standard press-release pitch for an artist who recently bought a synthesizer. It isn’t. Hearne built nearly the entire record himself, writing, arranging and performing in his home studio, where layered vocals, programmed rhythms, guitars, synths and assorted textures were free to multiply without a stage manager checking the clock. His longtime friend Dave Drago eventually added live drums. Otherwise, this is Hearne alone with the machinery and, more importantly, without the guardrails.

The timing fits. Running Out Of Future is the kind of title that would have sounded melodramatic a decade ago. Now it reads like something printed on the receipt after buying groceries. Hearne is working through environmental anxiety, damaged connection, community, resilience and the stubborn chore of remaining hopeful while the world supplies fresh reasons not to bother. Those are enormous subjects for six songs. The EP’s smartest move may be refusing to dress them in sackcloth.

Hearne approached the project playfully, and play matters here. In miserable times, experimentation can be its own refusal to submit. “Work To Do” puts the emphasis where it belongs—not on fashionable despair, but on what follows it. “Still Be Friends” brings the crisis down to human scale, where good intentions collide with emotional fallout. “Tightrope” practically names the governing condition of modern life: keep moving, don’t look down and try not to confuse balance with safety.

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King Pine’s blend of indie-psych-folk, folktronica and atmospheric pop gives Hearne plenty of room to maneuver. More important than the genre pileup, however, is the reversal of his usual working logic. Years of lean touring taught him to make songs function in real time. Here, he lets them misbehave. A voice can answer itself. A rhythm need not belong to a drummer. A guitar does not have to carry the furniture simply because it always has.

That freedom comes with a risk. Home-studio records can turn into private museums of every idea their creators could not bear to discard. But the six-song format suggests discipline, not sprawl. Hearne is not mounting a double-album coup against his former self. He is opening a side door and seeing where it leads.

Running Out Of Future is ultimately less about technology than permission: permission to abandon reproducibility, to let uncertainty shape the arrangement and to make a personal record that keeps looking beyond the person who made it. Hearne’s road experience remains in the walls, but it no longer dictates the floor plan. For an EP preoccupied with dwindling possibilities, King Pine’s latest begins with a bracing contradiction. The future may be running out. The music refuses to act like it. That refusal is the record’s sharpest source of hope.

Mark Druery