Ken Park (EP)

Ken Park — 2026

“Six songs, six years, and a wall of guitars – Ken Park arrives with a debut that feels raw, restless, and real.”

Liam Creamer grew up in San Diego, moved to New York, and started making music in his bedroom under the name Ken Park. He is 21 years old. Before putting out this EP, he spent time on tour playing banjo and lap steel as a sideman for alt-rocker Jake Minch, which tells you something about how serious he is about his craft. Ken Park is his debut release on TODO, and it pulls together six songs written across roughly six years, recorded on both coasts, and finished in Brooklyn in 2025. The result is a record that works as a kind of diary, covering the stretch of time from his last year of high school through his first full year in New York.

This is guitar-driven indie rock with a heavy shoegaze influence. Think walls of reverb, loud and crunchy guitar tones, and drums that hit hard. Creamer openly draws from My Bloody Valentine and The Smashing Pumpkins, and those influences are easy to hear in the band’s sound. Not every track goes loud, though. Some pull back into quieter, more acoustic territory, so the EP covers more ground than you might expect. Some songs lean into thick, fuzz drenched shoegaze while others move toward folk rock, carried by acoustic rhythms that feel warmer and more reflective.

What makes this EP unusual is that it was not written all at once. The closing track “Sleep Paralysis” is the original recording from six years prior, when Creamer wrote it at only 17 using an iPhone. Connecting his teenage years to early adulthood, the project comes full circle with the recordings left unpolished. The gap between that song and the final track recorded for the EP, “Dragonfly,” is stark. “Dragonfly” is noisy and abrasive, built around dry percussion and harsh guitar feedback. If you listen to them back to back, you get a real sense of how much his taste shifted over that time.

If you like Alex G, My Bloody Valentine, or Elvis Depressedly then Ken Park is an artist you should check out. The Smashing Pumpkins comparison holds up on tracks like “Shatter.” On “Maybe Delete,” the guitar tone drifts into hazy shoegaze territory, recalling the muscular guitar of Failure and the layered swirl of Ride’s early records. By the EP’s conclusion, listeners will also catch echoes of The Jesus and Mary Chain and Slowdive along the journey.

“Maybe Delete” opens the EP and immediately sets a high bar. It is loud, guitar-forward, and a strong first statement. “Shatter” is the most straightforward rock song on the record and one of the most immediately satisfying. “Crawl” is where Creamer gets the most personal. He wrote it right after leaving high school, and it is about the push and pull between wanting to start over and being scared of leaving what you know behind. “Nosebleed” you will hear the melodies of an Alex G while “Sleep Paralysis” closes things out on a delicate, shimmering note that contrasts sharply with everything that came before it.

Creamer writes plainly and honestly, which works in his favor. In “Sleep Paralysis,” lines like “come into my dreams and peel the lids behind my eyes” hold a strange, dreamlike tension that resonates without forcing the moment. Across the EP, his lyrics deal with isolation, growing up, and trying to figure out who you are when your surroundings keep changing. He does not overwrite. The words do their job and get out of the way.

Ken Park is a strong debut that works because it feels real. It was not made all at once in a polished studio setting. It was collected over years and across different versions of the same person, and that shows in the best way. The sequencing could feel uneven given how much the songs vary in tone and approach, but that variety is also what keeps it worth hearing from start to finish. At six tracks, it does not overstay its welcome and has you wishing this was a full LP. If this is what Creamer sounds like pulling together years of bedroom recordings, a proper full-length with a clearer focus could be something worth paying close attention to.