Sydney’s Royel Otis share one final track “Going Kokomo” from their forthcoming EP Sofa Kings out March 31. Otis Pavlovic and Leroy Bressington say of today’s single: “Going Kokomo is about letting go. Not sweating the small stuff. You’re a mere mortal trying to get a decent squeeze from this giant blue sauce bottle so just enjoy it while you’re here.”

Sofa King—Royel Otis’ third and best EP, a breakthrough of pure rock ’n’ roll elan—exclaims that they are just now getting started. In six songs and one smart instrumental, they buttress the same winning effortlessness with new depth, extra riffs and textures only strengthening their charms. Take “Going Kokomo,” a dead ringer for the most compulsive Phoenix song in a decade. Shimmying around a bright guitar line for three minutes, Leroy and Otis articulate the high-stakes sensibility of young love, of how it feels to be completely swept up in someone’s wake even as you fret about how it all may end. The drums, the guitars, the chant-along chorus? That’s the good mood of infinite possibility. The icy, Cure-like synths that unfurl in the distance? That’s Royel Otis’ subtle acknowledgement of how finite all this actually is.

Listening to “Sofa King” feels like love at first sight, on repeat, ad infinitum. If you haven’t spotted it yet, Royel Otis is not Otis’ conceited sobriquet. It’s his name preceded by that of Leroy, spelled backwards. Leroy is a fan of anagrams and other assorted word puzzles, so he once spent some non-insubstantial span trying to rearrange the letters of the duo’s combined names of into something clever. And then he realized the answer had been hiding there in plain sight, funny and easy and a little bit off, too. That is, turns out, the abiding ethos of Royel Otis—making spirited and mischievous rock songs that capture a feeling you have probably known all your life, inside songs you will not soon forget. To hear a Royel Otis song once is not only to hear a rock tune you’ll hum for the rest of your days but also to ask how something so seemingly simple and perfect didn’t already happen. Royel Otis’ hits-to-misses ratio does not exist; every hook-bound jam has been an absolute winner.

Photo Courtesy: Alex Wall