Valentine
Built on a deceptively dark melody and lyrics that sound like they were written by someone who definitely owns a shovel “for gardening”, it’s a love song with serial killer vibes. It’s tender, it’s tense, it’s the only Valentine you’ll receive this year that comes with both a chorus and a mild sense of foreboding. The Afterdays have made something strangely beautiful and beautifully strange. Musically, Valentine slinks in like a shadow at dusk, a brooding bassline, pounding drums, and guitars that shimmer with the kind of dreamy menace that says “I love you… forever.” There’s a pulse running through it, hypnotic and slow, like someone pacing behind a closed door and wrapped in a warm, deceptively cosy glow. It’s dark, it’s intimate, a love song that sounds like it might follow you home after the gig.
Hate It
Let’s get this out of the way, the video for Hate It by John Your Mate is a shameless, unapologetic, wildly unlicensed spiritual tribute to the Adam Curtis school of “confusing montage + ominous narration = ART.” We basically opened a folder called “Random Archival Footage That Might Be Profound?” and slapped it together with the confidence of someone who’s definitely read at least one think piece about surveillance capitalism. It’s moody. It’s chaotic. It’s got stock footage of things that probably symbolise something. In short: It’s pretentious. It’s over serious. In all honesty we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Up The Wooden Hill
Up the Wooden Hill comes from the John Your Mate album, Artefact, built out of John’s very first attempt in the late 1990s at making an 11-song record on a four-track cassette recorder. Armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar, a drum machine, and the kind of optimism only a younger version of yourself can muster. The plan was simple, use those dusty sketches as a blueprint to see how John Your Mate might sound as a proper band. The shocking twist? The songs still stood up, not just as relics of enthusiasm, but as genuinely strong ideas that deserved a second life. From that charmingly lo-fi experiment emerged Up the Wooden Hill, one of the album’s true highlights: a warm, slightly fuzzy love letter to childhood evenings, climbing the stairs to bed, slowly darkening evenings and all the tiny rituals that made the world feel huge and safe at the same time. It’s nostalgic without being sentimental, tender without being soft, and proof that even a four-track cassette and a drum machine can plant seeds that grow beautifully decades later.