“Through the Roof” - Midtown Vice
Photo Credit: Artist EPK
Through the Roof is not your typical debut EP. It’s not some polished, industry-tweaked debut with calculated hooks and radio-friendly breakdowns. Midtown Vice, the lo-fi musical alias of New Jersey-based John Mueller, is operating on a totally different wavelength — one that exists somewhere between a fever dream and a nostalgic VHS tape of memories you’re not sure are even real.
This EP is bedroom pop in the truest sense. Ttwo mics, a Scarlett 2i2 interface, a MacBook running Logic Pro, and a whole lot of sonic ambition packed into a modest room somewhere in northern New Jersey. That DIY ethos doesn’t just inform the sound — it is the sound. You can hear the limitations in the best way possible: the slightly imperfect reverb tails, the ambient room noise, the beautifully unpolished textures. But don’t let that fool you into thinking this is lo-fi in the lazy, apathetic way. This is lo-fi with vision.
The opening tracks of Through the Roof ease you in with dreamy guitars and reverb-drenched vocals that feel like they’re being sung from the bottom of a deep swimming pool of memory. There’s a haze over everything, like sunlight filtering through a dirty windshield. But there’s also a precision in the way these songs are put together — think early Beach Fossils meets Duster with a little Elliott Smith moodiness floating on top. And slowly, track by track, the EP starts to shape-shift. By the time you get halfway through, things are drifting into more experimental, borderline avant-garde territory, where songs deconstruct themselves mid-play, and the line between sound design and songwriting blurs completely.
You’ll catch elements of shoegaze in the woozy guitar layers, dream pop in the pillowy textures, slowcore in the pacing, and a whisper of emo in the lyrical vulnerability. One track might make you feel like you're floating through a memory, and the next might drop you straight into a moment of existential dread — often without warning. But that’s the magic of Through the Roof. It doesn’t care about convention; it cares about emotional truth.
Credit: Original photo: Ama Wick
Lyrically, the EP lives in the ambiguous. Mueller doesn’t spoon-feed you feelings — he offers cryptic lines and lets you fill in the emotional blanks. There are themes of loneliness, nostalgia, and old habits that refuse to die — all the weird, murky stuff that lingers in your brain at 2 a.m. when the world’s gone quiet. The songwriting has an intuitive feel, like it was made by someone who wasn’t trying to write hits, but trying to untangle a feeling.
The visual side of this project deserves a moment too. The artwork — a sketch originally drawn by John’s father and edited by John himself — feels like a perfect mirror to the music: surreal, personal, and a little bit off-kilter in the best way. It’s rare that an EP feels like a fully realized world, but that’s exactly what Through the Roof accomplishes.
Ultimately, Midtown Vice isn’t trying to be trendy or even particularly accessible. What Mueller is doing here feels more like a diary entry accidentally left open on a table — deeply personal, a little messy, but captivating in its raw honesty. If you’re into music that bends genres, blurs boundaries, and builds emotional landscapes more than just catchy choruses, Through the Roof is your next obsession.
Put on your headphones, close your eyes, and let it wash over you. Welcome to the world of Midtown Vice. Get ready to feel.
“Through the Roof” is available now on all major streaming platforms
