The Orielles - Only You Left

This fourth full-length from Manchester trio The Orielles has been self-heralded as a completion of a cycle - a return, of sorts, to the indie, song-led roots of their 2018 debut ‘Silver Dollar Moment’. Tempering the unfettered experimentation of their last outing, 2022’s ‘Tableau’ (where tracks clocked in anywhere between 50 seconds and eight minutes), ‘Only You Left’ does indeed emerge as a more structured project, roughly bound by a central polarity of “wood versus metal” - categories inspired by the band’s dual studio locales of Hydra and Hamburg.

It’s a textural contrast that colours not just their lyricism - ‘The Woodland Has Returned’; ‘All In Metal’ - but their compositions, too, with the former characterised by organic instrumentation and unfurling harmonies, and the latter by harsher lines and atmospheric closeness. Most interesting, though, are the moments these two material motifs converge: in ‘Shadow Of You Appears’, stabs of increasingly urgent, Psycho-like strings push to the point of elastic limit, before its propulsive, grounding guitar hook pulls us back from the brink; similarly, ‘Tears Are’ pairs the breathy cool of Esmé Hand-Halford’s airy vocals with grungy riffs and, later, an exhale of simple acoustic guitar, imbued with folky, bucolic warmth. Then there’s ‘Ember’ - built on skittish switchboard flashes and a resonant two-note bass refrain, it blossoms into an anxious, knife-edge soundscape of oppositional beauty.

By the record’s final third, however, its already loose ties are slackening, and the closing tracks start stretching to fill space beyond their timestamp, curiously all-consuming but intangible and untethered. A circle completed, then? Not quite - The Orielles have never dealt in such concise shapes.