After’s After 2 EP review: utopian Y2K pop pastiche

The Los Angeles band’s new EP, After 2, channels Michelle Branch and Aquamarine without feeling kitschy or dated.

I found out about After probably like many of their fans: On TikTok, when a grainy, seemingly camcorder-shot video of singer Justine Dorsey pulled up on my FYP. In the video, she’s seen walking through a Frutiger Aero city-scape, an invisible wind machine blowing through her blonde hair, singing along to the track “Deep Diving,” an aqueous pop song that sounded like a meeting of Aquamarine and Michelle Branch. I was hooked.

After, the Los Angeles band of Dorsey and Graham Epstein, who first met on Hinge, is committed to crafting a utopian vision of the early 2000s in 2025. The duo’s first EP, a self-titled five-song package released in April, mixes in moody drum and bass, grungy guitars, and shadowy trip-hop amid the bright mall-pop chords and flourishes, like a mix of Vanessa Carlton and Avril Lavigne. They’ve since refined that formula on their latest release, After 2, textural gems that linger on the more optimistic side of Y2K dreaming without kitschiness or feeling outdated.

Almost every song on After 2 channels that contented TikTok girl smiling with her headphones on as butterflies flutter in the background. “Deep Diving” beams like lying in the surf on the most pristine summer beach day; “Outbound” cozily yearns with breezy guitars and a hook that’s meant to be lip-synced while gazing out a window.; “Close your eyes” requests to share one’s intimate world with a jungle-beat and twinkling synths. These are songs meant to lubricate your brain; perhaps the only thing that’s frustrating is when you’re trying to remember what each song reminds you of and having the answer stuck at the tip of your tongue.

Dorsey and Epstein have said that they specifically embarked on After to make mainstream radio hits inspired by [the 2000s] — “a very specific sound they had back then.”

The entire concept of After might be a lot if you’ve not been fully converted to the Y2K trend train, which I thought had left me behind until I found “Deep Diving.” The problem with building so heavily on a reference is that the shortcut automatically alienates anyone not already captured in its purview. But After manages to turn their pastiche into a strength; producing a mimicry of something that’s so nuanced and studied it becomes its own kind of original.