When Mat Jones dropped last year's breezy, humble Small Prayer EP as It is rain in my face., he formed a strange hybridization of chillwave's electrified bedroom groove and '90s alt rock's guitar-centric balladry. His off-beat melding of accessible song styles gave Small Prayer a unique and bright persona-- "Opening 30 seconds of Interstate Love Song (Toro Y Moi Remix feat. Dickey Betts)"?-- but his budding inner gift for clever production with limited resources shone brighter still.

On "Fighter Pilot In A War," a new cut from his self-titled, debut full-length for DZ Tapes, Jones rises to new challenges as a songwriter while fleshing out the charming vibe of his previous work. The opening seconds fuse a percussively-aimed guitar loop, swirls of grainy digi-distortion, and panned echoes for an intro just long enough to turn heads, but by the time you've settled into a smile from that musique concrete mishmash, the anthemic choral trail of "not tryin' to tell you / who to be" sets in and steals the show. We see Jones excited, confident, and ambitious, no longer content with finding a juicy compositional element and looping it, but instead finding interesting new paths to develop it while he flies trails in the sky.

​It is rain in my face. drops August 21st on DZ Tapes. If you're around the D.C. area, you can catch the release party at new DIY space The Dougout this Friday, August 17th.