There is something about water that makes truth unavoidable.

Sarah Kinsley’s Fleeting EP is full of it. Rain, lightning, drains, floods, drowning — not as decoration, but as a way to explain what leaving feels like when it isn’t dramatic, just persistent. Across five tracks, Kinsley writes about the slow collapse of closeness: the difference between wanting someone and actually being known by them, the way fantasy can keep a person alive in your head long after they’re gone, and the hard truth that love can be real and still not be enough.

When asked what about this project felt healing and what it reflected about her growth, Kinsley described the EP as “a new understanding of myself and what I want to say.” She also shared that she used to rely on ambiguity as a kind of protection, and largely dropped this habit in her latest project. “When I was younger, it felt safer to be more ambiguous in my music,” she said, explaining that metaphors helped her keep a “defense mechanism” up. This year, she said, she went through major changes and felt stuck at times, and that “just saying what I meant has been incredibly healing.” You can hear the result: Fleeting is still dreamy, but it’s less hidden.

“Lonely Touch” starts from the EP’s core problem: intimacy that doesn’t translate. The production rises and falls in a way that feels tidal — holding tension, delaying release — and Kinsley uses contradiction to describe what she wants: “How to say what I want / Is to talk but not talk.” Later, she pushes the idea further: wanting to “feel without hands,” to “know without words,” to know someone “without talking.” It’s a song about craving closeness that bypasses language, and realizing that kind of closeness can still leave you with nowhere to place your feelings. The outro doesn’t resolve; it asks: “Where do I put my heart?”

“Truth of Pursuit” is the EP’s cleanest statement of obsession. Not obsession with a person, exactly, but with the version of yourself that existed near them. “I’m in pursuit of the feeling of you,” she sings, and the line matters because it doesn’t pretend this is about fate or soulmates, but about a feeling. The water imagery here is noticeably sharp: “I felt the sea, and now I’m standing in the drain.” She pushes it even farther: wanting “the flood of you back in my veins.” Once you’ve experienced something vast, the rest of life can feel like a comedown, where longing lingers like something almost chemical.

“Reverie” is where the EP turns inward. A “reverie” is a waking dream — being technically present, but mentally drifting, building a life in your head you can’t step away from. Kinsley frames imagination as both comfort and danger: “Imagination is a sacred drug.” The song plays like someone catching themselves mid-fantasy and forcing a boundary: “I leave the make-believe behind.” By the end, the drift becomes self-critique. She doesn’t just admit the dream wasn’t real — she admits why she needed it. “You were a scapegoat for my life to unravel,” she says in the outro, taking responsibility for the story she built around someone who was never going to stay.

That realism carries into “After All,” featuring Paris Paloma, which is arguably the EP’s most straightforward writing. There’s no elaborate metaphor in the chorus; it’s the kind of sentence that lands because it’s plain: “Love is not enough, after all.” Then she makes it even smaller and harsher: “Love is just a man I used to call.” The track holds two truths at once — “I know it ended… I know I chose it,” and still: “when the rain pours, I still long for you.” Paris Paloma’s verse mirrors that tension through time (“if we put the clocks back…”), as if the only way to make love work is to rewind the conditions that made it fail.

And then the title track, “Fleeting,” closes the EP with a brighter, 80s-leaning pulse — glossy and wind-up — while delivering its most direct message. The hook (“It’s not forever, it’s just a feeling”) works like a mantra, but the verses refuse easy optimism. You can “cut your hair” and reinvent yourself, but “it won’t stop the feeling.” You can blame the city or the pressure, but “it’s not the weather… that makes you wanna drown.” The song names the real source out loud: “You’re lonely… and you’ll feel it, even in your hometown.” Leaving, in this framing, isn’t only about losing someone — it’s about what follows you afterward.

Kinsley described this EP as holding “a level of vulnerability” she isn’t used to, but is enjoying, and shared that creating it helped her process things that are “harder to heal in conversation, but easier to say in songwriting.” Fleeting sounds like that: a project where the language is clearer because the person writing it is clearer. Water runs through every track, not to make the sadness prettier, but to make it legible. How it comes in waves, how it drains away, how it changes shape, how it tells the truth.