FiveSidedDice Rebuilds Pain Into Strength With the Kintsugi EP
FiveSidedDice’s five-song Kintsugi EP turns emotional damage into a study of resilience, connection, and renewal. Created entirely by South African multi-genre artist Roscoe Nefdt, the Gqeberha-based project treats music as a personal diary where difficult experiences are not hidden but transformed. Named after the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with visible seams, Kintsugi carries the idea that people and relationships can emerge from fracture, changed, refined, and sometimes stronger than before.
Nefdt has been writing, composing, recording, and releasing music through FiveSidedDice since around 2008, while also contributing to projects including Undead Generation and Twiza. That extensive musical history gives the EP a lived-in quality. There is no sense of an artist discovering vulnerability for the first time; instead, Kintsugi feels like another entry in an ongoing record of love, loss, frustration, friendship, existential uncertainty, and survival.
The EP was recorded at FiveSidedRecords, Nefdt’s home studio in Gqeberha, across 2025 and early 2026. The intimate setting fits the project's confessional character. His production choices also create considerable scale from modest surroundings. Vocals were recorded with two panned condenser microphones using an ASMR-inspired approach, while double-tracked guitars are spread across the stereo field to create a dense wall of sound. “Look Down” receives additional depth through separately recorded acoustic-guitar microphone and direct-input tracks.
Opening with “Misery,” Kintsugi wastes no time establishing its heavier side. A forceful drum-fill entrance gives way to a haunting harmonic-minor riff, followed by a high-tempo bass-driven passage that immediately creates momentum. That intensity makes the EP’s eventual descent into its closing track especially effective.
“Look Down” strips everything back, revealing a gentler and more melancholic side of Nefdt’s writing. Its final form was shaped during a stay at Wild Spirit Backpackers in Nature’s Valley, where Nefdt and Liaan Badenhorst worked on the instrumentation during a sunset. That moment helped define the EP’s destination.
Kintsugi succeeds because its concept is embedded in the music itself: breakage is acknowledged, examined, and transformed into something capable of carrying beauty forward.
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