Time Will Kill starts from a feeling that is all too familiar: the sense of not keeping up. Not just in the literal sense, but in that particular kind of anxiety that builds when unfinished things pile up, life moves at a relentless pace and the world around you keeps drifting towards darker places. On their fourth album, Dublin duo HAVVK, formed by Julie Hough and Matt Harris, turn that pressure into songs that feel heavy, restless, tense or unexpectedly bright depending on the moment.
The album opens with “Happening Again” and sets the tone from the first minute. Abrasive guitars, heavy bass and a drumbeat with an almost ritual pulse hold up a voice that seems to drift between the guitars, creating a near-hypnotic sense of repetition. That collision of shoegaze, noise rock, post-punk and almost doom-like density works as a preview of what HAVVK unfold across the record, where the tension builds track by track. “On Time” arrives next as a compressed punk blast, with drums pushed to the front and Julie’s voice almost shouted, as if the song were trying to keep pace with a head full of plans, tasks and pending goodbyes. “Bad Look”, by contrast, opens up the album’s more danceable side: bright, compact and driven by an indie-rock pulse that contrasts with lyrics about desire, dopamine and misread signals.
What makes Time Will Kill such a strong album is that HAVVK understand that pressure does not take just one form. Sometimes it lives in dense guitars; other times in faster, more melodic or even brighter songs. On “Crush”, it takes the form of melancholic weight, with shoegaze guitars that feel dense but still luminous. On “The Last”, it becomes more crystalline, with a prominent bassline, atmospheric guitars and a euphorically sad chorus that opens the song up towards The Cure at their most melodic. “Pick Your Poison”, with its thick, dragging fuzz, fits into the album as another expression of exhaustion, this time tied to the weariness of online noise.
Further in, the album opens up its sound and lets in some brighter moments, although the unease never quite disappears. “Nice to Meet You” turns social anxiety into a small alt-pop anthem, with a dynamic, almost ceremonial drumbeat that recalls, in spirit, the opening of Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps”. “Backwards”, meanwhile, takes that openness into the album’s most overtly pop territory: melodic, delicate and luminous, but shot through with a question that slowly erodes it. Its sadness is not nocturnal, but sunlit: the feeling of looking ahead and suspecting that everything is, in fact, going backwards.
“This Is It” closes the circle by returning to the density of the opening, this time with a slower, heavier and more ritual feel. The guitar’s ethereal groove, the prominent bass and a drumbeat that hits with steady force make the mantra “give me a little more time” feel physical. After an album marked by urgency, debt, desire, fatigue and regression, HAVVK do not close with a clear answer, but with a request for a little more time.
In the end, Time Will Kill impresses less through sheer volume than through the way HAVVK control it. The album knows when to load the weight onto the guitars, when to accelerate, when to let a melody breathe and when to sink into a slower, more ritual density. Against the more overwhelming anxiety of To Fall Asleep, this is a band that sounds more aware of its own contrasts and more confident in handling them. The result is not a less unsettled record, but one that turns that restlessness into something broader, more physical and more fully its own.
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