A poignant voyage through memory and growth — Kids Table lights up Bright Eyes’ catalog.
In the wake of 2024’s Five Dice, All Threes and a year of health-related setbacks, Bright Eyes return in 2025 with Kids Table, a tightly woven 8-track EP that plays like both a coda to their latest LP and a standalone statement of creative renewal. Recorded during the Five Dice sessions, this release finds the band leaning into familiar sonic textures while pushing their storytelling further into uncharted emotional territory.
The EP opens with the title track, “Kids Table,” a song that instantly recalls the band’s classic sound: introspective, world-weary and melodically rich. The interplay between piano and guitar feels effortlessly organic, echoing some of the arrangements from I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, yet there’s an unmistakable edge here. Conor Oberst remains in full storytelling mode, painting vignettes of disconnection, longing and the bittersweet rituals of adulthood. It’s a strong opener, setting the tone for the rest of the EP with a blend of nostalgia and sharpness that fans will recognize and appreciate.
One of the project’s emotional high points is “Dyslexic Palindrome,” a standout duet featuring Alynda Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff. Their harmonies are warm but haunted, as if the characters they’re portraying are singing to each other across a great distance. This vocal pairing adds a new dimension to Bright Eyes’ usual dynamic — a subtle yet significant shift in tone that opens the door to broader storytelling possibilities.
Elsewhere, “Victory City” stands out for its ambitious scope and layered arrangements. As one of the EP’s focus tracks, it encapsulates the band’s ability to take a small idea, a fragment of memory or feeling, and expand it into something near-epic. Like much of Bright Eyes’ best work, it walks the tightrope between the personal and the political, the intimate and the existential.
Throughout the EP, you can hear echoes of past Bright Eyes albums, but they don’t feel like retreads. Instead, Kids Table functions more like a conversation with the past; one that’s honest, critical and still evolving. There’s a throughline here that connects back to the band’s Companion series (which revisited older albums with alternate versions and new takes), but Kids Table looks forward as much as it looks back.
The context surrounding the EP adds weight to its emotional undercurrents. Following Oberst’s vocal issues in late 2024, which led to the cancellation of Bright Eyes’ tour, Kids Table arrives not just as a creative offering, but as a sign of endurance. Their return to touring in early 2025 — and their ability to mix new material seamlessly with fan-favorite staples — suggests a band re-grounded and inspired again.
Bright Eyes have always thrived in the margins — the spaces between hope and despair, youth and age, memory and miscommunication. Kids Table lives in that space too — and proves, once again, that few bands can make it sound quite so human.
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