Junior Mesa thought it was the beginning of the end. Having just moved to Los Angeles from Bakersfield at the Southern tip of the San Joaquin Valley, where he made his debut EP Peace, the 19-year-old was ready to hit the ground running and harness all the creative energy that the city of angels had to offer. Instead, the sensory overload of his surroundings   triggered a physical revulsion. One seizure at a Lauryn Hill concert led to many more, which led to an eventual epilepsy diagnosis that warped his workflow into an arduous endeavor. “It was really hard to make music because my seizures were caused by overstimulation,” he says. “I was in this toxic relationship with music: it was the only thing I loved, but it was killing me in a very literal way.”

Faced with new uncertainties in his health and a dying relationship in a city that was completely new to him, Mesa felt as though he could no longer run from his demons. “It felt like my reality wasn’t real,” he remembers. “There was a freakshow going on around me: clowns jumping out to scare me, and I’m not religious, but it felt like the devil was the ringmaster.” Throwing his hands up and relinquishing himself to the weirdness, he wrote “What’s Enough Pt. II,” a pleading funk number that asks “what’s it going to take for a person to love me, and what’s it going to take for me to feel okay?”

They’re questions that reverberate throughout the Los Angeles-based artist’s new EP, Cirque Du Freak, out August 13th via Nice Life Recording Company. Entirely self-composed, the project demonstrates Mesa’s sharpened prowess as a songwriter and multiinstrumentalist, while probing deeper into a glam funk soundscape aligned with his musical heroes of the 1970s. Flanked by carnivalesque alter-egos such as The Diva and Tubby Terrance, Cirque Du Freak dares to suggest that when life starts to get freaky, we should get freaky right back with it.