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Bed of Every is the debut EP from Gay Meat, the solo project of the North Carolina-based rock musician Karl Kuehn (Museum Mouth, Kississippi, Say Anything).

Following a run of woozy one-off singles, the new EP features five unassuming bangers that meld well-worn hallmarks of indie and emo with Kuehn’s self-deprecating wit and brazen sentimentality. Coming in at just under 13 minutes, Bed of Every offers listeners a brief yet enthralling glimpse into the private world of a gifted songwriter with a lot on his mind.

Back in 2018, when his late mother began dealing with the fallout from a serious brain injury, Kuehn realized that he needed a home for his most personal writing. Gay Meat became that outlet, an alias through which he could release songs that felt too broody or intimate to mesh with the collaboration-centric material he was
accustomed to recording.

Kuehn is still working on the first Gay Meat full-length, which will grapple with the
destabalizing memories surrounding his mother’s diagnosis and hospitalization. Luckily, the Bed of Every EP contains enough anxious charm and big-hearted hooks to hold us over while we wait.

Co-produced by Brett Scott, Bed of Every collects Kuehn’s boldest and most evocative Gay Meat songs to date.

Opener “Heart-Shaped Flail” — a catchy slice of power-pop with arcade synths and bleak-funny couplets like “30 going on 19 / What does Heaven mean?” — transitions seamlessly into “Perception Shift,” where new wave guitar ripples mingle with jittery programmed drums. “Anne Marie,” a topsy-turvy highlight about the sometimes soul-sucking realities of life as a working musician, shows off Kuehn’s ability to turn observational dread into textural earworms: “What am I selling? / Great question, Anne Marie / Relatability,” he sings wryly over crunchy chords. “Bed of Every,” the EP’s last and longest song, details a dissociative episode that Kuehn experienced after his mother’s death, impulsively driving 100 miles to a South Carolina beach town in an attempt to feel close to a
memory of her. “Do you savor sadness? / Or do you think I am batshit?” he ponders in the opening verse, before the song splits open into something stormier and more epic-feeling. It’s a pretty perfect ending for the EP, and not just because of its thematic ties to the nostalgia- and grief-fueled creativity that inspired the Gay Meat project in the first place.

It’s perfect because it successfully makes a string of tiny moments in Kuehn’s life sound as monumental as they undoubtedly felt. It’s perfect because it’s a song that no one else on earth could have written.

Kuehn has been calling Bed of Every his “neurotic pop song EP,” a half-joke that actually sort of perfectly captures how the music marries addictive melodicism with thoughtful poetry about queer romance and mental health. The description also hints at the extreme interiority of the collection’s point of view, at the way these five songs are linked not by an aesthetic or an idea or a mood, but by a single human brain. In this instance, that brain belongs to Kuehn — a lovable, dewey-eyed depressive with a knack for making sad-as-hell rock songs that get lodged in your brain and trapped in your heart.