On This Track: Midweek Listening #11
Five new tracks about what we carry with us - memories, identities, relationships, and the communities we find along the way
Music can hold onto things that are difficult to put into words. A relationship that has changed, a version of yourself that exists only onstage, a song an audience refuses to let disappear, or a community that starts on a sidewalk and eventually reaches far beyond its original home. This week’s - On This Track Midweek Listening 11 - five tracks approach those ideas from very different musical worlds. There is darkwave, punk, roots music and raw alternative songwriting, but underneath the different sounds is a shared interest in connection: to other people, to places, to memory and sometimes to the person we are still trying to understand ourselves.
Allo.B - “After the Light”
With “After the Light”, Allo.B moves into Darkwave, built around hard beats, a dark bass and a driving rhythm that gives the track a strong physical pulse. The production stays dark and melancholic, with subtle piano touches adding another layer without taking over the arrangement. Allo.B writes and produces the music independently, keeping the entire process in her own hands. The lyrics center on intimacy, absence and the strange feeling of remaining emotionally still while everything outside keeps moving. “The city keeps on moving / But we're standing still” captures that contrast at the heart of the song: the world continues, but two people remain caught inside a moment of their own. That tension between movement and melancholy runs through the whole track. The beat keeps pushing forward while the darker bass gives the sound its heavier edge, leaving the vocals and atmosphere space to carry the emotional weight. It gives “After the Light” a distinctly nocturnal quality without turning the song into something purely atmospheric. When the chorus returns to “After the light / We come alive”, darkness becomes part of the transformation rather than simply something negative. The song stays suspended between loss and closeness, with its driving electronic pulse carrying both feelings forward.
🎧 Stream “After the Light” by Allo.B on Apple Music
Hamish Hawk - “Intriguer / Tenderness”
Edinburgh songwriter Hamish Hawk returns with “Intriguer / Tenderness”, one of two new songs introducing his forthcoming album of the same name. The synth-driven track sits at the center of an album built around two opposing sides of Hawk: “Intriguer”, remote, charismatic and grandiose, and “Tenderness”, more vulnerable, troubled and exposed. That tension becomes particularly interesting when viewed through the relationship between performance and private life. Hawk describes the two sides partly through the difference between the person onstage and the person away from it - the larger-than-life version created through performance versus the more vulnerable self underneath. On “Intriguer / Tenderness”, those identities do not remain neatly separated. They influence and distort each other. The song deals with pain, self-criticism and the uneasy process of turning difficult thoughts into lyrics. Hawk has described writing it as a cathartic experience that helped him understand where the album begins and ends. That makes the track feel less like a character study from a distance and more like an examination of what happens when the voice you perform with starts becoming part of the way you speak to yourself. With "Intriguer / Tenderness", Hawk takes that conflict between persona and vulnerability and makes it the foundation of the record. The result is music that is theatrical on the surface but deeply personal underneath.
🎧 Stream “Intriguer / Tenderness” by Hamish Hawk on Apple Music
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Cowboy Hunters - “Punched In The Head”
Cowboy Hunters’ “Punched In The Head” arrives with an unusual problem for a new single: people had already been asking for it for months. The Glasgow band had built an audience around live appearances, video sessions and unreleased material, with people repeatedly demanding that songs they had encountered online actually become available. By the time “Punched In The Head” officially arrived, the release was already part of an ongoing conversation between the band and its audience. That says something about how music releases work now. A song no longer necessarily starts its life on release day. A live performance can circulate, a short clip can travel through social media and an audience can become invested in a track long before there is an official version to listen to. For Cowboy Hunters, that pressure eventually became part of the release story itself. The music fits the chaos. Punk and grime collide with distorted sounds and a deliberately unruly attitude, while the band’s live shows have become another important part of the picture. Their September 30 launch show in London had already reached capacity after demand far exceeded the available space. “Punched In The Head” is therefore not just a new song arriving in isolation. It is the next step in a relationship that has already been developing between a band, its live audience and an increasingly visible online community.
🎧 Stream “Punched In The Head” by Cowboy Hunters on Apple Music
Bridge City Sinners - “Spears and Blades”
Bridge City Sinners have one of those origin stories that makes the distance between local music and international touring particularly visible. The Portland band grew out of the city’s street-music community, with members first playing together on sidewalks before the group took shape in 2016. That history still matters to how they operate. Banjo, fiddle, guitar, upright bass and ukulele bring Appalachian folk, bluegrass and old-time jazz into the same space as punk energy. Their music is rooted in traditions that have long been connected to communal performance, while the band’s live shows turn those influences into something louder and more unruly. Their DIY approach extends beyond playing music. Bassist Scott Michaud runs Flail Records, a label built around collaboration and a “do it together” philosophy. The band’s story is therefore not only about taking traditional sounds somewhere unexpected. It is also about keeping some of the community structures that helped create the music in the first place. Their new one-shot live video for “Spears and Blades”, filmed during a show in Cologne, captures that connection particularly well. A continuous shot from the stage leaves little distance between performers and audience. After beginning with sidewalk performances in Portland, Bridge City Sinners now find themselves playing internationally without entirely leaving that communal foundation behind.
🎧 Watch “Spears and Blades” by Bridge City Sinners on YouTube
Big Red - “Lost (And Found)”
On Big Red’s “Lost (And Found)”, distance becomes something much more personal. The song is the closing track on "Big Sur" (out October 30), an album written between London and Santa Cruz and shaped around the idea of longing for a place and for someone that remains out of reach. The title destination, "Big Sur2, becomes less of a literal location than an imagined state of mind. Across the album, California represents something hoped for and mythologized, while the final realization is that the journey never actually happened. “Lost (And Found)” takes that idea inward, turning memories and places into a record of a relationship that has disappeared. What makes the song especially striking is how directly that feeling entered the recording. Joseph Scarisbrick wrote much of it while flying home from San Francisco, then recorded an initial demo after returning home. The finished version was recorded live with the three-piece, with very little studio intervention. Even the emotion at the end of the recording remains audible. There is something fitting about that lack of distance between experience and recording. The song is about being unable to let go of someone, and the performance itself refuses to smooth away the evidence of that feeling. Loss becomes geography, memory becomes a list of places, and the final act of care is surprisingly simple: worrying about someone even after they are gone.
🎧 Stream “Lost (And Found)” by Big Red on Apple Music
What connects these five releases is not a particular sound, but the human tension underneath them. People disappear into memories, step into different versions of themselves, build relationships with audiences, carry musical communities with them, or turn places into symbols of something they cannot quite reach. The music gives those experiences different shapes, from hard electronic beats to punk chaos and stripped-back songwriting. Independent music often begins with something very personal, but it rarely stays there. Once a song leaves the hands of the person who made it, it becomes part of someone else’s memory, night out, community or story. That movement - from the private to the shared - is what makes these tracks worth listening to.
Keep discovering independent music with our other On This Track, Three Track Week and Artist Features.
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