The track arrives carrying a weight that belies its runtime. Ostensibly a meditation on addiction and the cycles of self-destruction, *God Knows* refuses to wear its subject matter like a badge or deploy it as a rhetorical weapon. Instead, Doyle wraps his darkest material in something almost pastoral — a piano-led arrangement so gently persuasive that you might miss the sting of the lyric entirely if you weren't paying close attention. And that, it turns out, is precisely the point. This is music designed to slip past your defences, to nestle into the background of a late-night study session or a long commute, and only gradually reveal itself as something far more searching than ambient comfort.
The piano work here is where *God Knows* truly distinguishes itself. Doyle has spoken about experimenting with chord progressions in ways he hadn't previously attempted, and the gamble pays off handsomely. The chords do not simply accompany — they *breathe*. There is a restlessness to their movement, a sense of something circling without ever quite resolving, that mirrors the lyrical theme of compulsion with an almost architectural precision. When the drums enter, they don't impose a rhythm so much as respond to one already present in the harmonic texture, nudging the arrangement forward with a lightness that keeps the whole thing from ever tipping into heaviness.
The vocal delivery deserves particular attention. Doyle sings with a conversational intimacy that recalls the best of the bedroom-recording tradition — not polished out of all humanity, but not so rough as to become a distraction. The lyrics themselves are admirably resistant to over-explanation. Take the line about having "a habit that's a magnet to the shadows in my vein" — it is vague enough to belong to almost anyone, yet specific enough in its imagery to feel genuinely observed rather than merely composed. It is the work of a writer who understands that the most powerful confessional songwriting is not the most explicit, but the most *transferable*.
The sonic palette places Doyle in interesting company. The influence of Quadeca's melodic adventurism is audible, as is the dreamy, genre-bending sensibility of Mid-Air Thief and the lo-fi introspection of Parannoul. Yet *God Knows* does not sound like an act of pastiche. Doyle has absorbed these reference points thoroughly enough to have metabolised them into something that feels distinctly his own — a sound that is simultaneously catchy and cerebral, light on its feet yet loaded with meaning.
What is genuinely impressive, given the circumstances of its creation, is the production quality. Recorded entirely in a bedroom with borrowed equipment from his university, *God Knows* possesses a warmth and spatial coherence that suggests either natural instinct or painstaking care — likely both. The rawness Doyle describes as a feature of his creative process is, on this evidence, not a limitation but a strength. The slight imperfections, the organic textures, the sense of a human hand shaping every element — these are precisely the qualities that elevate bedroom recordings from curiosities to genuinely compelling listening.
Bath has always been a city of quiet distinction. Ethan Doyle seems well placed to continue the tradition.