Love Amongst Ruin - Alone

There are some songs that seem much older than they really are. Love Amongst Ruin’s brilliant new track Alone is one such song. It’s dripping in the gloomy, angsty rock vibes of the late 80s and early 90s. All echoing guitars and an infectious hook of ‘I don’t wanna be this alone...’ There’s some magical element to this track that transports you back to that blurry space on the edges of your memory; faded images of a place and time that you can only partly remember.

Steve Hewitt’s vocals match the music perfectly, all whispering and laced with sinister intent. It has the effect of instilling the song at once with both an icy chill and an enveloping warmth of reassurance; there’s a drama to the lyrics here that goes beyond the bog-standard energy of most rock bands. As an acoustic guitar gently picks out the outro, you can almost hear the fingers on the strings; the raw, organic drive of the music, the sense of it as a genuine force. Alone marks another brilliant single for the band and a fantastic taster for the album as a whole; it was one of my surprise favourites from last year and is definitely worth checking out.