The Planet

Ejecta did not get to keep the name. In 2014 a DJ who records as Ejeca sent a cease-and-desist, and Leanne Macomber and Joel Ford came back as Young Ejecta. The Planet, six songs in 24 minutes, came out on Ford’s label, Driftless Recordings, on January 27, 2015. It was not the record Macomber had in mind. She wanted a second full-length, but Ford was doing so much mixing and producing that, in her words, she “had to wrangle him”, and they settled on a mini-album. Making it, she found she liked the shorter format because it held together better.

The songs are not new, exactly. Macomber wrote them, she said at the time, alongside the Dominae material, and they didn’t make that album. The label’s announcement said this set drew on minimalist electronic music, European disco and 1970s pop, that Ford had been stricter with his sounds, and it called the lyrics “manic depressive”. The character stayed. Macomber, who also played keyboards in Neon Indian’s live band and studied photography in Texas, describes the project’s nude images of Ejecta as self-portraits, and the cover is another one: Ejecta half-submerged in dark water, wearing nothing, so that nothing places her in a class or a culture.

“Your Planet”, the nearest thing to a title track, is for Josiah, a close friend who died when they were both just short of 21. Macomber has said her fantasy is that he now has a world of his own and looks back at Earth knowing how much she loves him. BuzzFeed, which premiered the song, heard Italo disco with a long instrumental break, and Pitchfork described Ford moving from organ to a dance bass line underneath. Its video, directed by Heidi Petty from a story by Macomber, was shot in San Francisco in the winter of 2015 and dedicated to Josiah. It uses sign language, which she wanted as a way to reach people who can’t hear music.

“Into Your Heart” opens the record and was the third single. It grows from a quiet start into a 4/4 club pulse, and Pitchfork noted that her voice is dry and double-tracked here, with none of the reverb of Dominae. “Welcome to Love”, the first single, premiered by Gorilla vs. Bear in November 2014, is a break-up song that takes in microwave dinners and a forgotten call to her mother; Driftless also issued a clean version. “Recluse”, at 5:36 the longest song, is the one AllMusic singled out, for a mood that moves “from hopeful to doubtful to mournful”.

The reviews were good, with a wide spread. AllMusic gave it four stars, and Exclaim and Under the Radar an 8, with Under the Radar calling the approach leaner and stronger than the debut’s; The 405 gave it 7.5. Metacritic’s average settled at 71 from seven reviews. Paste, at 7.2, missed the big moments of Dominae. Pitchfork, at 6.5, liked the cleaner singing more than Ford’s deliberately cheap synth sounds and named “All Day” as a song that wanders. PopMatters, at 5, heard thin, demo-like production, and the split ran down to single songs: the “Recluse” that AllMusic praised was a plod to PopMatters.

The Planet was a fallback, and the short format suits it. Six songs leave no room for filler, and taking the reverb off Macomber’s voice puts her lyrics up front: a phone call she forgot to make, a friend she wants to believe is still out there. Those are its strongest moments, and on Exclaim’s reading it is Ford’s spare production that exposes them. Where he leans harder on the synths, critics stopped agreeing. The next album, Ride Lonesome, took until June 2020, and the 2017 single “Build a Fire” was the only release in the years between.