Heart Chain, a project born out of grief, channels loss into something strangely luminous, and nowhere is that clearer than on their haunting new track โTwinkles,โ lifted from their forthcoming full-length The End To All the Things. The band describes their work as reaching through the shadows of death and sorrow to find the strands of light still shimmering beyond.
The song comes with a fragile female vocal, soft and unguarded, set against an ambient haze. Then you can hear a faint male laugh echoing into the atmosphere. Thereโs even the imperfect rumble of the sound caught in the recording mic, which makes us realize that what weโre hearing is basically life and its mundanities caught mid-breath. Then the deep and insistent beat drops and grounds the ethereal fragility in something earthbound.
Childrenโs giggles drift in, bright and fleeting, brushing against the edges of the soundscape. In counterpoint, a womanโs humming echoes as though from the tiled walls of a bathroom, its reverberation spraying a warmth amidst the distance, like memory remembered from another room. When the orchestral swells arrive amidst this intriguing noise, they lift the track upward, alongside the grief on waves of grandeur until it feels almost sacred.
Lyrically sparse, โTwinklesโ speaks more through sound than words, but its fragments evoke a dialogue between presence and absence. Itโs as if the song begs the question, just how do we hold on to the light of those weโve lost without being undone by the darkness of their absence? In seeing the life that once was through the act of remembering as a form of mourning, Heart Chain delivers an ode to nostalgia caught live.
STAY IN TOUCH:
SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | WEBSITE
Review by: Naomi Joan