The Long Way to Simple: SMFC - It’s Already Done (EP Review) Released: 2/20/26 (Part 1) & 3/27/26 (Part 2)

 

There's something refreshingly unpretentious about calling your debut EP The First Four Songs. No cryptic title, no elaborate concept, no attempt to manufacture mystique out of thin air. Just Steev Custer, a guitarist with more than thirty years of Chicago scene credibility behind him, putting his work in front of you and letting it speak for itself. In an era when even the smallest releases arrive wrapped in press releases thick with buzzwords and carefully curated influences, that kind of directness feels almost radical. Custer is not a new name to anyone who's paid attention to the Chicago punk and rock underground, and his fingerprints are all over the city's musical history with names such as Death and Memphis, The Bomb, and My Big Beautiful. It's a lengthy résumé that spans post-punk, power pop, and everything in between, but these are bands built on the premise that a great song is worth more than a great concept, and that ethos carries directly into SMFC, his solo project. The name itself, which consists of four initials, offers no explanation, and the feel of a piece with the whole enterprise. Take it or leave it. Here's the music.

The EP opens with "Punk Rock Changed My Life," and the title alone tells you a great deal about where Custer is coming from. There's no irony in it, no winking detachment. He means it. The song operates as both a personal statement and a kind of mission declaration for the project: this is who I am, this is what shaped me, and I'm not embarrassed about any of it. That lack of embarrassment is actually one of SMFC's most compelling qualities. So much rock music made by veterans of the underground comes loaded with self-consciousness, a defensiveness about sincerity that manifests as distance or cleverness. Custer doesn't bother with any of that. He plays it straight, and the song is stronger for it. The full-band arrangement fills the room without cluttering it, and guitars that have clearly been thought about, a rhythm section that locks in and serves the song rather than showing off within it.

"It's Already Done" is the EP's emotional centerpiece, and it's the track that lingers longest after the record stops. The title carries a weight that the song earns rather than assumes, and there's a resigned quality to it, a sense of reckoning with outcomes that can't be undone, but Custer doesn't let it collapse into self-pity or melodrama. Instead, the song sits in that particular zone that the best rock writing occupies: emotionally honest without being emotionally indulgent, specific enough to feel personal but open enough to feel universal. It's the kind of song that makes you think the writer has been through something and come out the other side with enough perspective to turn the experience into something worth hearing. The guitar work here is understated in the best sense, nothing flashy, every note placed with intention. You get the sense that Custer has spent enough years around great players to know that restraint is its own kind of skill.

What makes the EP particularly interesting as a document is what it suggests about the range of SMFC as a live proposition. Custer performs these songs everywhere from solo acoustic shows to full band rock productions, and you can hear that versatility embedded in the writing itself. These are not arrangements in search of a song; the songs exist first, fully formed, and the band fills them out rather than defines them. Strip away the electric guitars and the drums and the weight of a full ensemble, and the melodic and structural logic of both tracks would still hold. That's a harder thing to achieve than it sounds. A lot of rock music falls apart when you remove the volume, because the volume was doing more of the work than anyone admitted. Not here. There's also something to be said for the timing of this release in the context of Custer's larger body of work. SMFC is a solo project in the truest sense, and it's a space where the songs answer to no one but the writer. After decades of collaboration, of fitting your instincts into the shared vision of a band, there's an obvious appeal to that kind of creative autonomy. 

And yet The First Four Songs doesn't sound like a musician showing off what he can do without anyone else in the room. It sounds like a musician who has absorbed enough from years of working with other people that he knows exactly what a song needs and provides it. The EP is confident without being arrogant, economical without feeling thin.  At just two tracks on the primary streaming release, the EP is admittedly brief, but it is more of an introduction than a full statement. But introductions can be done well or badly, and this one is done well. It establishes a voice, communicates a set of values, and leaves you wanting more. With the debut full-length Unadulterated due out this summer, The First Four Songs functions as exactly what it says it is: the beginning of something. Based on the evidence here, that something is worth paying attention to. Steev Custer has been around long enough to know that the music either works or it doesn't, and that most of what surrounds the music is noise. The First Four Songs is a veteran making the case, quietly and without fanfare, that he still has something worth saying. He does.

Check out the full band version of the track Punk Rock Changed My Life: 

Go give him a follow on Instagram: Steev Custer