The song takes its name from the lightest element on the periodic table — the stuff of children's birthday parties and the cooling systems of nuclear reactors, simultaneously trivial and essential, always on the verge of escaping. It is a quietly perfect metaphor for the album's central subject: the couple's navigation of polyamory during the early years of a marriage, and specifically the few days Rosenblum spent with a girlfriend, followed by the months of emotional wreckage that followed. Where lesser songwriters might reach for abstraction or obscure the wound behind allegory, *Helium* plants its boots firmly in the specific. The kitchen argument, the 3am ceiling stare, the text left on read — you feel their presence even when they go unnamed.

Rosenblum's guitar work deserves particular attention here. Recorded live in a rented Colorado mountain house with the amps turned up to the point of honest distortion, the tone is neither pretty nor polished, and that is precisely the point. The instrument doesn't so much accompany the melody as argue with it, circling Sydney's vocals the way anxiety circles a rational mind — persistent, not entirely welcome, impossible to silence. It recalls the nervous tension of early Yo La Tengo, or perhaps a less patient Mazzy Star, though to reach too eagerly for comparisons is to underserve what is fundamentally a very singular piece of work.

Sydney's vocal performance is the record's great revelation. Hers is a voice that understands the difference between singing *at* an emotion and singing *through* one. She doesn't oversell the grief; she inhabits it the way you inhabit a room you're not sure you're allowed to leave. The restraint is devastating. British listeners raised on the confessional tradition — on Tracey Thorn's forensic plainness, on Polly Harvey's capacity for controlled devastation — will find familiar coordinates here, though Sydney is charting her own territory with considerable authority.

The production choice to keep everything breathing and unguarded, to prioritise feel over the clinical perfection that dominates so much contemporary indie-folk, pays enormous dividends on *Helium* specifically. You can hear the room. You can hear the people. When the song swells in its latter half, it doesn't feel like an arrangement decision — it feels like a temperature change, like a conversation that has finally found its real subject after twenty minutes of circling.

What separates *Helium* from the crowded field of singer-songwriter confessionals is its refusal to offer resolution as a reward for emotional investment. The song does not conclude so much as exhaust itself, which is exactly how prolonged emotional pain actually works. Nobody sits down at a piano and writes the last note of their grief. They just eventually stop, for a while, and wait to see what morning looks like.

That commitment to honesty — structural, emotional, sonic — is the band's defining characteristic and their greatest gift. *Helium* is not a comfortable song. It is not designed to be. But comfort was never the contract on offer here. 37 Houses write about what marriage actually feels like when you're inside it without a map, and on this particular track, they've produced something that will quietly wreck anyone who has ever loved someone and not been entirely sure how.

Extraordinary.