Indie band can’t be blue has released their debut EP “Prussian Blue,” a visceral exploration of emotional collapse that forgoes explanation in favor of pure feeling. The five-track project charts a devastating journey through the final stages of love—from its ending through regret, obsession, rationalization, and ultimate breakdown.
Rather than articulating grief through words alone, the band leans into intuitive sonic expression, creating an album that prioritizes sensation over clarity. Each track functions as both a distinct emotional stage and a breadcrumb trail leading to the next descent.
The EP opens with ‘Black Tesla,’ featuring XngHan, a song that immediately establishes the project’s atmosphere of toxic stagnation. The central metaphor—being stuck in a Black Tesla—evokes a relationship trapped in limbo, expensive and sleek on the surface but ultimately going nowhere.
XngHan’s lyrics paint a portrait of love that’s lost its vital signs. The recurring question (What would love be?) followed by (next time/later) captures the emotional procrastination of two people who can no longer access what they once had. The line “사랑 못 해 우린 with no champagne” suggests celebration has curdled into dysfunction—they can’t love without the intoxication that once made it possible.
The song’s most haunting proposition opens it: “Maybe we should die in next Christmas,” a darkly romantic fantasy of ending things before further decay. Small details accumulate the weight of intimacy gone wrong: a watch covering wrist scars, blurred focus making the partner unrecognizable, the shift from drum samples to guitar because of her preferences—artistic choices made for someone who’s now a stranger.
The title track ‘Should be you’ shifts from stagnation to desperation. Here, the narrator’s obsession crystallizes around a central, agonizing truth: infidelity born not from lack of love but from its opposite—an inability to accept that the relationship has ended. The opening plea—”오 그대여 / 꺾을 수 있는 꽃이 되어 주세요” (Oh my dear, please become a flower that can be broken)—reveals the paradox at the song’s core: a desire for the beloved to be fragile enough to return, breakable enough to need him again. The narrator clings to desperately to a person—physical betrayal as proof of emotional fidelity, as if the act itself demonstrates that no one else could truly replace her.
The repetition of “That should be you” becomes a mantra of substitution anxiety. Every experience, every moment, every hypothetical future—death, drowning, endings—should feature her. The obsessive return to this phrase mirrors the inability to move forward, the mind looping endlessly around what’s been lost.
“Prussian Blue” takes its title from a color historically used in art and architecture—deep, permanent, and created through chemical process rather than found in nature. It’s a fitting metaphor for the kind of sadness the EP explores: manufactured through the alchemy of loss, impossible to wash away, staining everything it touches.
The progression across the five tracks (with ‘Is you’ ‘dim’ and ‘Waiting’ rounding out the emotional arc) suggests that grief isn’t linear but cyclical, each song a different shade of the same inescapable blue. The EP doesn’t offer resolution or healing, instead, it commits fully to documenting the experience of being trapped inside heartbreak’s relentless machinery.
“Prussian Blue” demonstrates remarkable emotional maturity and artistic restraint. can’t be blue has created something intimate and devastating, an EP that understands heartbreak not as a single emotion but as an entire landscape to be mapped and survived.
“Prussian Blue” is now available on major streaming platforms.
