After a nine-year wait, siblings Steph and Paul O’Sullivan return supercharged, with a deep well of emotion to draw from on long-awaited second album.
The roads into Greywind’s allegorical Severed Heart City are long, winding and paved with trauma. The only bridge out is acceptance and hope. In a way, it encapsulates the last near-decade of their lives, in which their fortunes were destroyed and rebuilt when their label dropped them after 2017 debut Afterthoughts, but then fans revived their music on TikTok. It’s unsurprising, then, that after so much time and so much pain, the Killarney duo are making music with enough fire in their stomach to burn bridges down.
Severed Heart City has all you could hope for from modern emo: gravity defying choruses, big melodies, and perhaps strongest of all, a sense of knife-sharp emotion. Vocalist Steph O’Sullivan bares both her teeth and her heart with lines so blunt they’re merciless – ‘I can’t find my halo, it slipped off, I tried / I killed all my friends ’cause they wanted to die,’ she sings in a vortex of self-destruction on IKAMF. Happy’s initial mid-tempo sweetness curdles when Steph cuts through to the twisted, ugly roots of mental anguish: ‘I’m not happy / Feel like jumping off a bridge with my legs tied to bricks.’ Meanwhile, the soaring Waterfall is just as candid, but from a different angle as Steph takes on an uncaring love interest described as ‘the worst emergency contact‘.
None of these lines would punch as hard if there wasn’t great music behind them. Dramatic opener Acid Rain pounds hard like a thunderstorm on the roof, while the slower-paced Moon adds a shot of gooey warmth, and The Scarecrow boils down their sound to the bare bones for an intimate moment of reflection. Catchiest of them all is closer Cope In The Coma, a pacy, uplifting soundtrack to speeding towards the light whose ‘coping through hope in a coma‘ refrain proves hard to dislodge from your head.
Ultimately, this is the sound of a band who know they cannot waste their second chance. Instead, they’re playing like this might be the last album they ever make. If they get what they deserve, however, the next album surely can’t be nine years away.
Verdict: 4/5
For fans of: RØRY, As It Is, Holding Absence
Severed Heart City is released on January 16 via FLG
