There's the name of the duo: Grey Animal.
The moniker makes the mind search: a dog, a whale, a cat, a horse, a grey hue of some shade on an animal of some sort?
Or an amalgamated and abstracted sooty beast?
A union?
Or is it an allusion to the liminal state of being, neither here nor there, but in-between and being pulled?
The mind?
Growth?
The music, as a whole, is in a lineage of trip-hop, hip-hop, house, soul, neo-soul, and those are all genres but they exist within this grey area; a musicologist might paint Donnie Hathaway having dinner with Beth Gibbons and Pete Rock to describe what they offer. Ultimately, Grey Animal creates work in the lineage of human sound and human feeling. It is knotted and complex. It is not showy, but it is refined and reflective of something common. The work is strong and recognizes what it is doing.
Grey Animal is a woman of color walking down a street in America in the 21st century. These are the sounds and these are the words. She is not ignoring her thoughts or herself despite moving; she is moving with intention. As much as it is music, the production provides more of a series of scenes. A nighttime rain slick street, headlights and streetlights and neon signs reflecting and bouncing off the oiled concrete, a soggy cereal technicolor. The music that surrounds her envelopes her inner expressions and pushes them forward. The production drips. The reverb: it's a church, it's the echo of an alleyway argument, it's the horns and the shouts and the screams and the laughs on a sidewalk celebration spilling into the street; the sun hitting it, the rain beating it; it's hazy, lost in clouds of varied smoke from car exhausts, factory pollution, cigarette and weed smoke, covered in soot, history, and the energy of other people. It's the urgency of everyday as the woman walks down the street. These are the sounds.
In this collision of expressions, shelter is sought: homes, caves, nests, and an evading cages. The words acknowledge histories, trauma, generational and otherwise. The words recognize a mutual struggle and a mutual desire for what is needed not wanted: healing and perseverance.
The name of the ep is Emergence.

- Karlos Rene Ayala