My Teeth Are Tap-Tap Dancing — Listening to Jo From School's EP "Grace, Flair and Distance"

Grace, Flair and Distance — three words in an unlikely juxtaposition, yet they fit together so well. Jo from school has blended everything painful and optimistic into one dense, layered EP, the kind that keeps folding back on itself with every track. Each song called on difficult feelings of mine, but wrapped them in metaphors sophisticated enough to genuinely surprise me, especially for something this short, and considering that this is a first project. The whole experience felt closer to therapy than listening: cathartic, intricate, and quietly returning to itself at every turn.

That sense of circling back is what struck me first, on the track "Release". The song slowly builds, tackling difficult emotions, and I first noticed around building toward something at 1:10, when the instrumental intensifies. The listening experience ends in a grand release, and the more you think about it, the best metaphor for this track is inhaling through the verse and letting go of the air in your lungs at the end of chorus. It's the structure that sticks with you — but that's not the only place it shows up.

The creativity in the composition really hit me on "Chicken". There's an intentional lack of line break in the chorus:

If your lungs stop working / If your liver is clean / If you're breathing toxins / If you mention me out it to family / Then what if I go into town / Tiptoeing, timing's tad off / See, your friends, they say what I did was so ugly.

This whole part is sung without proper pauses between lines, almost like the way overthinking spirals: without pause, swift, and gone before you can brace for it, leaving you breathless. It's the same inhale-and-exhale pattern from "Release," played out again. Here, the lack of pause is broken by the next line,

Say hi from me.

— the "hi" sounds almost like a sigh of relief, a slow, relaxed exhale after anxious rambling that quiets all the noise in your head. So the shape repeats: a build-up through the chorus, then release at the end, just like before. Was this intentional, or is it just my interpretation? We can't say, but it's worth making these observations as a listener — giving a work of art the time and attention it deserves.

While we're still on creativity in composition, I want to give a special mention to "Julia Roberts" for how it repeats "I haven't felt this way since I got here," twice over such a short, perfect beat — it feels like scratching an itch you didn't know was there. Crazy brownie points, too, for the onomatopoeia in "my teeth are tap-tap dancing." My poetry-obsessed self fully nerded out over that one.

But let's talk about my favourite part, i.e., the meaning of the song (by now you must have caught on to how much I love dissecting song lyrics). To me, this track felt like a struggle between being an empathetic person (or at least being expected to be one) and acknowledging that you cannot be the help someone needs while you yourself are in need of support. Like the rest of the album, this one is cathartic in the way it says something that sometimes needs to be expressed but often fails to be. Here's the amazing chorus, sung with striking dynamic contrast, which I'm ready to scream out next time I'm drained from taking care of everyone else while ignoring my own problems:

Something's welling in the corner of your eye

Staring at me like I'm a junior doctor

Sad matter trapped in the cornea, and I

I haven't felt this way since I got here

I haven't felt this way since I got here.

From there, the album gives us a song for everyone who listens to one track on repeat until they know the words by heart and can sing along to all of it. (It's me. I am those people.) "Weight" is that track — its lyrics are so metaphorical and layered that I honestly had a few 'aha!' moments connecting the dots — moments that were immediately tempered by the realization of just how poignant the message was. One of those moments was wondering what "it" stands for in the chorus:

It's gone wild, to the wall it sticks

I claim you with weary fists

Mock the choice, spoil the now

Answers sharp,

I love,

But you weigh the world down.

I thought about what could go wild and still stick to a wall. My first thought was a calendar stuck to a wall, mocking the realization that something has run its course and it's time to leave. Then I thought of wild ivy crawling up a wall, capable of eventually bringing it down. Then I thought of the 'sparrow' mentioned earlier in the song being somewhat glued/stuck to the wall and flailing wildly for freedom. For me, the whole song perfectly captures the feeling of knowing something is over, and clinging to it with the weary fists of someone tired of fighting for it. Despite the sharp answer — the knowledge that there's still love inside you — someone can still bring your world down, still make you unhappy. It reminded me a little of "Skinny Love" by Bon Iver, and of how many times I've cried to that song. This one feels so underrated. I'd call it a crime to sleep on this track.

Then, in no particular order (because that's how I listen to music, sorry), there's "Underhand", with its beautiful instrumentation in the fade-in and fade-out, which I read as wheels turning in your head. I'm obsessed with the scream under the chorus, followed by a confessional hook — almost a soliloquy — in the line "did I ever change, or patch up my dead skin out of view," followed again by those same turning-wheel, introspective instrumentals. Perfection.

In honor of there being six tracks, I have to mention, symmetrically, "Six Years of Keeping On". I think it falls in sync with "Weight" but sits in a completely different vibe, lyricism, and composition — proof of Jo's versatility. It reads almost like a conclusion to "Weight," like being able to see things clearly from a distance:

Six years of keeping on (…)

A few weeks of feeling home,

then pressed up against the skin.

That's six tracks covered, and fittingly, that's also where my complaint about this EP begins:

I love that it has six tracks, and I hate that it only has six tracks.

I like that it doesn't follow the conventional 8–13 tracks I usually expect from an album — it doesn't overwhelm, and it gives everything space to sink in. I'm ready to obsess over this on repeat for the next few months. The singles are well chosen, the album cover is a literal piece of art that perfectly captures the complexity of the record, and the composition is creative and experimental. Overall, it's a full circle. One small thing I'd wait for is lyric videos, since I personally struggle when I miss a few words.

"Grace, Flair and Distance" succeeds in being both uniform and dynamic in its creativity, and most importantly, it does what an EP is supposed to do: make you want to wait for whatever jo from school does next.

LISTEN TO JO FROM SCHOOL'S EP HERE: