London’s Tough Cookie sit somewhere between art rock, grunge and atmospheric alt rock. Their new single, Let Me Die (Curled In Your Arms), is a melancholic ballad that starts with clean, spacious guitars and ends up buried under fuzz and distortion.
The arpeggios are delicate, with open chords and a nocturnal, almost narcotic feel. August’s voice builds slowly but never loses a fragility that’s very Jeff Buckley. From there everything starts to open up: more layers come in, the guitars get denser and the drums hit harder, until the song explodes in a way that reminds me a lot of Mitski‘s “Your Best American Girl”. The harmony barely moves; what changes is the size of the sound, and that’s where the song really hits.
(It´s) about getting close to someone or something because of how good it makes you feel, even when there’s something slightly unhealthy about the attachment”. (August, Tough Cookie´s frontperson)
At first it sounds like a love song, but scratch the surface and it gets a lot darker. Lines like “Oh I could get used to this” and “let me die curled in your arms” are also about dependency, about that point where you start losing yourself in someone else. And breaking the hands off the clocks so “the whole world stopped” is basically the same impulse: wanting to freeze the moment, even if it means getting stuck there.
“Let Me Die (Curled In Your Arms)” is taken from Devotion, Tough Cookie’s new EP, out 23 October via Gravity Records.
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