Another surprise for me, as 2025 has now come to an end, is Brain Leak’s excellent Put Back Together EP, released on Tuesday, December 9, 2025.
Brain Leak is an emerging Manchester nu-riot grrrl supergroup. It is led by singer-songwriter Tara-Gabriella Engelhardt. In addition, the group features Giulia Bonometti from Working Men’s Club, Jess Branney from Peaness, Sidonie Hand-Halford from Orielles, and Ellie-Rose Elliot from Blanketman.
Their 4-track debut EP, Put Back Together, has a real sense of urgency. The EP runs just over 16 minutes, and it never feels forced.
The intensity is quieter, subtler, and more disconcerting, which makes the music feel important. The EP sounds raw, modern, and surprisingly human. As Engelhardt describes it, it is a collection of bone-bearing songs written during a volatile stretch of early sobriety, a period she calls “completely dismantling, but also the first time I learned how to rebuild myself with intention.”
The EP draws from riot grrrl and post-punk traditions but goes further while keeping their core ideas. Bands like Sonic Youth and Sleater-Kinney come to mind, as Brain Leak shares their bold energy and emotional honesty. The music values confrontation, vulnerability, and honesty. Guitars scrape and shimmer, rhythms rise and fall, and vocals move between restraint and bursts of emotion.
The track, “Save Me,” opens the EP with lead singer-songwriter Engelhardt’s clear, definite aim. It’s built on tight guitar lines and a pace that feels close to losing control, grasping a moment of held-back desperation.
This track feels urgent, but not in a dramatic way. It’s restrained, controlled, and quietly anxious. The vocals are central to the song’s impact. They’re sung with intimacy, showing exhaustion as much as need, so the song feels more like admitting limits than asking for help. The lyric, “Take me, lead me, save me. Designed to complete me. Do what I want with you, as I let you enslave me,” captures this tension and reveals the track’s vulnerability. It’s a strong opener—emotionally direct but not too revealing, and intense without going too far.
The second track, “Something Skin,” shifts the EPs focus from emotional openness to physical discomfort. While “Save Me” feels inward and psychological, “Something Skin” draws attention to the body as another source of unease. The guitars are rougher, leaning more toward harshness than melody, and the rhythm section keeps a tense, forward drive.
There’s a sense of agitation throughout the track, as if the song can’t settle into its own shape. The lyric – “Peel me out my skin. I wanna go” – suggests feeling disconnected from your body, as if you’re trapped inside something alien or uncooperative. The result is provocative yet not aggressive, using tension instead of loudness to unsettle the listener.
That tension becomes more withdrawn on “Hide,” the EPs most closed-in track. Instead of bursting outward, this song turns inward. The arrangement feels intentionally tight, using space carefully and letting silence matter as much as sound. The vocals float rather than lead, matching the sense of retreat in the title. “Hide” shows a different kind of anxiety—not panic, but avoidance; not fear, but exhaustion. It’s a quietly powerful track that proves Brain Leak understands emotional intensity doesn’t always have to be loud.
Together, “Something Skin” and “Hide” form the EPs uneasy middle, marked by a back-and-forth between openness and hiding. This push-and-pull is one of Put Back Together’s main qualities.
The EP closes with “Put Back Together,” a track that feels carefully chosen and balanced. Instead of offering release or resolution, it feels like an aftermath. The song builds slowly, adding layers that suggest endurance more than healing. There’s no big release or sudden shift from dark to light.
Instead, the track focuses on the slow, hesitant process of moving forward, existing in a way that works even if it’s not fully healed. I love the key change, which comes at around the 2:30-minute mark (“I’m tired of breaking my own heart.”). Orchestral strings abound!
At just over 6 minutes long, musically, “Put Back Together” is broader than the earlier tracks yet still feels controlled. It’s a quietly strong ending, showing that the desperation in Put Back Together isn’t something that’s been overcome, but something that’s been lived through.
Across all four tracks, Brain Leak shows a strong lyrical style. They never provide simple solutions. Put Back Together isn’t about redemption or tidy emotional endings; it’s about identifying, expressing, and enduring tough feelings.
The production helps support these themes. The EP uses contrast, moving between noise and quiet, tension and release, closeness and distance. Nothing sounds overdone, and the imperfections are left in. This choice makes the songs feel real, as if they’re capturing moments rather than just performances. It fits music that’s focused on vulnerability and instability.
Verdict
In the end, Put Back Together functions as a remarkable debut EP not because it reinvents familiar genres, but because it uses them thoughtfully and honestly.
Brain Leak understands that real emotion often comes from rough edges, unsettled tension, and not pretending everything fits perfectly. By giving each track its own emotional focus—from the desperation of “Save Me”, to the harshness of “Something Skin,” the withdrawal of “Hide,” and the fragile persistence of “Put Back Together”—the band has created an EP that feels carefully arranged and deeply felt.
This music isn’t meant to comfort. It’s designed to be sensed, thought about, and revisited. The EP shows that Brain Leak is a band willing to stay with discomfort and encourage listeners to do the same. In 2025 and now 2026, that appears both rare and necessary.
Moving ahead, it’s likely that Brain Leak will go even deeper into the raw, honest themes that made their debut stand out. They might try new genres or experiment with different sounds to challenge their audience.
Whatever direction they choose, it seems clear that their subsequent releases will continue to invite self-reflection and provoke thought, holding onto the tension and vulnerability that define them.
This makes following their journey even more interesting and promises more exciting music in the years ahead.
Rating: 8.8/10
Chris Garrod, January 2, 2026
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