As far as youthful indiscretions go, the joyride is the ultimate expression of freedom and rebellion—but it’s also an activity that can lead you back to the same old spots, doing donuts in an empty parking lot with no idea of where to go next. It’s the sort of conflicted emotional experience that R&B singer Kira Huszar, aka LOONY, had to grapple with when, after a stint living in Montreal, she moved back to her old eastern Toronto neighborhood, Scarborough. The result of that homecoming is the JOYRiDE EP. These six warm neo-soul serenades are steeped in feelings of both comfort and confusion, and thrown off balance by Noah “40” Shebib protégé Akeel Henry’s penchant for dubby production tics, psychedelic folk soundscapes, and strange spoken-word interstitials. “I guess this EP is a way to recontextualize some parts of my growing up,” LOONY tells Apple Music. “The idea of joyrides ties into the idea of transportation, and with these songs, I’m revisiting old wounds and relationships and trying to take control of them.” Here, LOONY invites you to ride shotgun on a track-by-track cruise through the EP. PRELUDE “I wanted to set the scene with something that felt a little bit panicky, like some sort of crash had just happened, because I wanted to just get right into the more personal, darker content of the record and channel that first. So I started recording this skit, and I did like 15 takes, because I really obsess over things. I wasn't sure which one to pick, so I sent it to Akeel. We were in the studio and I ran to the washroom, and as a joke, he started playing them all at once. I laughed at first, but then we were like, ‘Wait—this actually gets across what I wanted to do.’ It feels like a bunch of voices in my head, and it has this really weird feeling that's actually probably better than just a skit on its own.” iN CODE “This song is a bit of a reflection on growing up in my neighborhood. That's a theme I like to explore a lot, because there's not just one way to do it. In the first verse, I'm trying to put myself in that day-to-day struggle period when you're feeling like you've just got to get out of this neighborhood…but then you end up romanticizing it a little bit later. So the song kind of grows in that way, where I'm just trying to encompass all of the many feelings I have about where I grew up—and it's not always one thing, so I tried to mash them all together.” WHiTE LiE “This is more of a relationship song. It's about being too scared to do something, so you make up a bunch of little white lies—things you tell yourself to make you handle a situation better, whether it's right or not. You kind of create your own reality with your words and the things you tell other people and the things you tell yourself. And you just keep saying these things until you think they're true.” NO ! “To me, this song just feels like madness—Akeel describes it as a kind of organized chaos. And the way it loops even mimics the relationship I'm talking about, where the dynamic never really changes and things could get dangerously out of control. A lot of the song is about being afraid to say certain things to certain people. And at the end, I'm playing off the idea of how you forget your own voice as you grow up, and how the situations you're put in can change the way you view things for a while. So I'm musing on that idea of: How do I remember what I was like before all of this? What are my own thoughts? What do I really want? Do I want this dynamic? Why do I think I'm this overly nurturing person who can't say no? It's one of the most honest lyrics I've written in a while.” SUMMERTiME / CiGARETTES “It's so easy to write happy songs about summer, but for some reason, I always feel a little bit of dread toward it. It's hot, and you can smell your neighbor's garbage, the crime rate goes up, and people are just out later and not really thinking right. There's just this feeling where you hope nothing bad happens. Toward the end, I wanted to record another verse, but Akeel was like, 'Just talk it.' So I started just saying it out loud, not even on beat, and then it just became this weird poem with a lot of effects on my voice, so I don't even sound like me. And we sampled my grandma. I'm super close with her, and I spent large chunks of my summers with her growing up. She escaped from Hungary during the revolution, and she wanted to act and sing, but she was never able to do those things she wanted to, just because of circumstance. So I always try to put a little piece of her in the stuff I'm doing. Sometimes, I'll just put my phone on record when we're hanging out, and then I’ll use one of the clips to set up the next song.” GHOSTS “In this case, the ghost is like the remnants of a relationship. When you have any sort of relationship with anyone, you're carving out this thing that's between you and them, with memories and history and all that. And when people stop talking—or if something crazy happens, like someone passes away—you still have that connection to them. You can't really explain it—it's a little bit more intangible and spiritual.”