Arliston

ARLISTON are poised to become the UK’s unofficial ambassadors of gloom – self-described “sad song specialists”. Their music is concerned with that particularly fraught time of life – the late twenties and early thirties – and all of the confusion that accompanies it. Yet the music itself is far from chaotic.

Instead, it is steeped in an inky black pool of sparse but sprawling Americana; minimalist pianos are paired with gloopy synths and singer Jack Ratcliffe’s striking, morose baritone. The songwriting, too, is stark but striking. We hear the faint buzzing of static, monologues, snatches of half-conversations. They are the sounds of someone stumbling and tripping their way through life, offering the listener an opportunity for a kind of melancholy catharsis.

Artists performing live

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