Premiere: Lisa Heller exposes heart on barebones new EP, ‘The Lisa Heller Project’ -

We filter our lives through art we create or consume. Lisa Heller bottles up her journey through anxiety, heartache, isolation, and self-enlightenment with her new EP, appropriately called The Lisa Heller Project. Four songs capture every violent rise and fall, psychological thunderstorms framed through barebones piano work, an act which allows her voice to bear the weight. “I never thought I would be releasing music that is essentially just piano and vocals,” she admits to B-Sides & Badlands over email.

Brooding opener “Figure It Out” lays out the foundation with an astonishing, and spooky, skeleton structure. “Leave me alone / Oh, I don’t need your pressure / I got plenty on my own,” her whispers shiver down the spine. “I’m so far from home / I got so much room to grow.”

In striking out to Los Angeles, the city of fame and fortune, she exposed herself in the most vulnerable state: a wide-eyed ingenue with big ambitions still wading into uncharted personal waters. “I felt like I was trying to fit in,” she says of the song, inspired when she first broke ground on the west coast. “I think a lot of 20-somethings are searching for who they are and who they are supposed to be.”

Heller’s frankness of lyrics elevates the production’s equally-unfussy, yet poetic, outer coating. Therein lies the dazzling charm of her new EP, woven through such standouts as the therapeutic “Pulling Away,” a dissection of her own tussle with mental anguish and waning friendships. “I saw it coming a mile away / It’s happened before / Always ends up this way,” she fully confesses and confronts her own toxic cycles, leaving fingerprints on every facet of her life.

“I have felt like I have pulled away from my friends when I started to feel like my anxiety was getting in the way of our friendship,” she says. “It would kind of be this cycle where I would get anxious; they would pull away, and I would pull away even more. I have found friends in LA that love me for who I am, which has really helped me to open up, anxiety and all.”

“Closure” slides into frame as the set’s more explicitly broken-heart anecdote, still airy and sticky to the skin. “I wrote [this song] about someone specifically, and even now every time I hear that song, it’s who I think of,” she offers. “It’s about wanting closure but also not wanting it to ever end.”

It is perhaps with closer “Deep End” that Heller truly excels most. “I’d fall a hundred times / And I’d get back up / Holding out for you / To save me now,” she emits a mournful cry. “Talk me off this ledge / I feel unsteady / In over my head / Drowning in doubt.”

In succumbing to demonic forces, dragging her through a murky, mental underworld, she gasps and grasps onto lyrics that underscore a collective state of misery. “I sang ‘Deep End’ at a convention last year to 1,000 high schoolers, and they all held up their cell phone lights (a first for me), and then some of the students came up to me with tears in their eyes after, saying how the song had moved them. That’s when I knew that I really wanted to make an EP from a vulnerable place ⏤ the reason I started writing music in the first place.”

Heller’s The Lisa Heller Project EP officially drops everywhere tomorrow (April 17).

Listen below: