The Los Angeles Project Opens *Soft Serve* With Dreamy Momentum and Open-Road Ease
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“Shortcuts”
moves with the ease of a song that has nowhere urgent to be. The Los Angeles project GOODTWIN, led by Augusta “Gus” Alexander, settles into a loose, sunlit groove here: warm percussion, stacked harmonies, and enough open space for the track to breathe. As an introduction to Soft Serve, GOODTWIN’s debut EP, it establishes a world that feels relaxed without being casual about its construction.
The song had been sitting around for years. Alexander first wrote “Shortcuts”
alone in her bedroom, then set it aside because the idea felt almost too simple. Returning to it later through collaboration changed the equation. The arrangement keeps that original directness intact while giving it more movement and character, particularly through the percussion and layered vocals. A wandering saxophone becomes the track’s most unruly element, slipping around the edges of the melody and keeping the otherwise polished production from feeling overly tidy.
There are familiar coordinates in GOODTWIN’s sound: the understated cool of Men I Trust, Fleetwood Mac’s unhurried sway, some of Yo La Tengo’s looseness and Japanese Breakfast’s melodic instinct. But “Shortcuts”
is more interesting in the way Alexander pulls those sensibilities together than in any single reference point. Soul, funk, alternative pop and soft-focus indie all pass through the track without demanding to be named. What holds it together is a strong sense of restraint. Nothing is pushed harder than it needs to be.
That suits the song’s lyrical world. “Shortcuts”
is preoccupied with motion, but not necessarily arrival. It has the atmosphere of a drive taken partly for the sake of driving: destination blurred, imagination wandering, the long way suddenly more appealing than whatever efficiency promised. Beneath the breeziness is a small act of refusal—the idea that getting somewhere quickly may not always be the point.
That feeling extends naturally into GOODTWIN’s broader framing of Soft Serve as “Open Road Music.” It could easily become an aesthetic slogan, but “Shortcuts”
gives the phrase some substance. The music feels genuinely shaped by movement and in-between states, by the strange emotional latitude that opens up when there is distance behind you and no immediate need to arrive.
Even the GOODTWIN name carries something personal beneath its brightness, taken from Alexander’s affection for her twin sister. That mixture of intimacy and lightness suits the project. There is care in the details, but very little heaviness imposed on them.
“Shortcuts”
ultimately works because GOODTWIN never asks the song to become more complicated than it needs to be. Alexander’s early instinct that the idea might be too simple turns out to be almost exactly what gives it character. Revisited with the right collaborators and enough room to move, that simplicity becomes the track’s strongest feature.
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