by Philip Moss

There is day time music and night time music. And sitting somewhere between the haunting timbres of Leonard Cohen’s Various Positions and Vic Chestnutt’s West of Rome, as music that should only be listened to by candle light, Alex Maas’ new single, Been Struggling, certainly falls into the latter.

Born from memories of of a conversation with an unnamed ‘she’, the murmuring chords grow to a sublime ramshackle of lo-fi instrumentation around the Texan’s voice. He stands up against the craziness of the world, and the expectations that he would feel like ‘the rest o’ them boys’ – defiant and, seemingly content, to helm his own path, and not conform to societal expectations. An anthem for optimism, quite simply put, the first taste of upcoming album, Luca, is a masterstroke from a voice we can all rely on in the dark.

Luca is out on 4th December through Basin Rock.

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