Before “How You Left Me Still” introduced Mark Cee to the indie press this year, there was Ghost Talk Show, the name under which these same songs first found an audience back in November 2025. It’s built the same way everything since has been, alone, at home, without a label or outside production polish, and listening to it now feels like catching the Long Island songwriter mid-development, already writing with real conviction before the wider world caught on. The five tracks here, “I Am Dreaming Of,” “And Now the Rain Is Gone,” “Thought I Saw You Yesterday,” “Don’t Buy The Gas Station Gummies,” and “Drifting Back Again,” make up a small but telling catalog.
“I Am Dreaming Of,” “And Now the Rain Is Gone,” and “Drifting Back Again” are the standouts here, and they’re really good songs. All the material on Ghost Talk Show has that unmistakable folk song quality, sitting around a campfire with a catchy melody, and the best example of that is “Drifting Back Again,” which carries that warm, communal simplicity better than anything else on the record.
“And Now the Rain Is Gone” is completely different. It’s almost a psychedelic, cinematic piece, with how the vocals float on top of the instrumental, carrying a subtle echo that has at least around three repeats on it. It’s very melancholic at points, but ultimately it’s radically hopeful. There’s an almost spoken section toward the middle where the narrator explains that they thought things were always going to be hopeless, but well, now the rain is gone. Nothing lasts forever, even despair. It’s the clear emotional peak of the record and points directly toward the kind of grief-and-resilience songwriting that would define “How You Left Me Still” a few months later.
“Thought I Saw You Yesterday” and “Don’t Buy The Gas Station Gummies” round the collection out with a lighter touch, the latter title alone hinting at the wry, unguarded personality that shows up even in Mark Cee‘s heaviest material. Taken together, Ghost Talk Show plays less like a proper debut and more like a sketchbook that turned out to already have finished songs in it. For anyone who’s come to Mark Cee through this year’s singles, going back to hear where “And Now the Rain Is Gone” and “Drifting Back Again” started is well worth the trip.
