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Listen to the fragile new single from Lonesome, For We Are Strangers Again
The latest track from Cambridge emo outfit Lonesome’s forthcoming debut album is all about the strangeness when love is no longer there.
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Album review: Lonesome – In The Hope This Finds You
Channeling the catharsis of emo with post-rock’s density, Lonesome’s debut album is a grief ritual with a cinematic twist
- Words:
- Emma Wilkes
Lonesome have approached their debut album with a curate’s eye. The track-list forms a sentence, and a looping drone that flows together from the end of the album round to the start again when the disc is left to spin. Between these intricacies and the conceptual story featuring the two characters in striking red and black on the cover, the depth of their ambition is writ large. None of this, of course, holds up when the music won’t do the heavy lifting. Fortunately, the Peterborough quintet’s sense of quiet grandeur means it absolutely does.
Something about their sound is familiar and unfamiliar all at once. They’ve taken the celestial atmosphere that plenty of bands, particularly British ones, want to evoke right now and folded it into a new shape, denser but no less gorgeous. Songs float like clouds from one point to another, shapeshifting along the way, such as the grandiose opener Liar, a tidal wave of both emotion and sound. Can You Hear Me? patters along with an almost anxious rhythm, as close to upbeat as they might vaguely get, the central ‘Can you hear me? / Can you see me?’ line howled to the sky as the ‘whoa-ohs’ kick in. You’ll Say It’s Love is a little more immediate, a stellar centrepiece that crashes into a colossal crescendo before dwindling again to a gentle shimmer.
It all beautifully befits a story in which vocalist X is in the eye of a storm of pain, bereft by the loss of a connection that was fraying and then ruptured altogether. Eventually, he is to be left on his knees. With a backbone of acoustic guitar strumming, For We Are Strangers Again is a world-shattering moment of mourning as he stares at the dying embers of that relationship, while Just Like You Wrote Me is a suitably tear-streaked finale that lets in a crack of light.
It’s a cathartic voyage through devastation that could easily stir the feelings of anyone listening as they’re brought along on the journey. Thoughtful it is, agonizingly introspective too, but it also very much succeeds in doing something different.
Verdict: 4/5
For fans of: Holding Absence, Blanket, Lastelle
In The Hope This Finds You is out 19th September via Easy Life