The single release of Coffee Café followed on 15 October of that year.

Coffee Café

Ever sat on your own in a café? It can often feel like a lonely experience, where the world is very much outside of you and you are very much inside yourself. This song is about yearning for connection.

‘The Good Valkyrie’ began with a single bass line from Jake, reminiscent of the Wagner classic ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ due to its ascending series of notes. We then developed the rest of the song around voices rather than rigid chord structures. Both Jake and Matty are in a capella groups, where vocalists perform all the chord changes.

However, in ‘The Good Valkyrie’, we wanted to keep each voice distinct, rather than using more familiar gospel or harmonious vocal forms. We experimented with singing different lyrics simultaneously. The idea was to give the sense of different viewpoints in a community, and build the song’s energy through drums and recombination of these separate threads to convey rising elation and achievement. The lyrics describe someone with wings taking flight for the first time, people’s reactions to that event and ongoing spiritual journey.

What would you do if you suddenly came across a person with large, bird-like wings? Of if one day you grew such wings and decided to fly to try to find others with wings like yours? Such a creature might be one of God’s angels, or a Valkyrie, a demon of the battlefield, but could a Valkyrie be good like an angel?  If you saw such a creature or found you had become one in real life, then the distinction between angel and Valkyrie would become a great deal more important…

Bronze Boy

This song developed musically from the beginning keyboard riff, which our guitarist and singer, Matty, created. The song soon took on an explosive rock energy, very reminiscent of vintage art rock bands like Jefferson Airplane in the 1970’s. However, the lyrics are inspired by Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Gold Mouths Cry’, which centres on a bronze statue of a boy as the seasons shift around him. The core tension of Plath’s poem is the unchanging permanence of the bronze boy image compared to the fragility of real human youth and mortal life.

Creating a bronze statue is like wishing to live forever. This idea seems particularly poignant today, given our known limitations over nature due to climate change and the challenges to humanity posed by AI and advances in robotics. So while this song comes from the rock and roll spirit of having fun & making the most of things, the style of keychanges, shifts in beat and lyrics hopefully conveys an authentic modern edge

Whisper to the Candle

This song is the emotional heart of our forthcoming album ‘Crossing the Paths of Angels’. Its a sweeping, cinematic autumn ballad built around poetic storytelling & string arrangements. The lyrics describe a seance in an old house. There is a romanticism & yearning, but it’s dark. Instrumentally, the song winds together an early Victorian music hall aesthetic with a sense of isolation and stillness. Instead of a drum beat, we used the BBC sound archive sample of Big Ben and in that sense, this is a very archaic, English song evoking Gothic fantasy & mystery.

Nietzsche to Nothing

Was Friedrich Nietzsche a nihilist? That is debatable. If Nietzsche was alive today, he would appreciate TikTok.

Listen out for the ghostly keyboards during the verses, which sound a bit like whistling.

Crowley’s Wharf

A place where giant, hulking Victorian structures stand immobile and derelict. The backdrop for a memory of a fleeting smile from someone running across the grass on the far side of black railings.

Tribal drums contrast with ethereal clarinet and vocals. Inspired by the poem ‘Sculptor’ by Sylvia Plath.

Love Letter from a Physicist

How might a physicist express his feelings of love? Surely by using his own understanding of the world, in a language born of logic, reflection and meditation. There is enchantment in the search for scientific knowledge. Beneath a world of flux and change, lie mysterious structures and constants. True love, like scientific insight, arrives softly and with innocence in the soul. 

Allow a physicist to dream!

This song is in ¾ time and plays with numbers, e.g. the number of drum beats, voice beats, and the timings of emphasis in a bar.

Hybrid Human

The joy of immersion in video games and fantasy worlds is total. We are at one with our machine, compelled to continue in our exultation like singers in a baroque opera where voices combine to transcend the mundane; we are our avatar, and invested in every tailored experience together with our online friends as though our very own feet unexpectedly happened upon a travelling carnival. There is primal satisfaction in that celebration and discovery. But we need an anchor for the soul.

This song features some chords played on a very old accordion once owned by Kealey’s Irish Grandmother.