The lineage is worn honestly on the sleeve. Pink Floyd's majestic sense of compositional patience, the kosmische drift of Tangerine Dream, and the sun-baked moral ambiguity of the western genre — these are not subtle reference points, but the craft lies in how they are metabolised rather than merely quoted. Lesser artists reach for these touchstones and produce pastiche. Soft as Hell reaches for them and produces atmosphere, which is considerably harder to fake.

The chord progression at the heart of the track is where the real intelligence resides. It moves with the unhurried confidence of someone who has genuinely listened — not just to their influences, but to *silence*, to the gaps between notes where tension and longing do their best work. The guitar riff, when it arrives, carries the kind of melodic inevitability that makes you feel you've heard it before, then immediately grateful that you haven't. This is not a small trick to pull off.

Drumming duties fall to Jamie-Ray Scarratt of Raygun Studios, and the decision to bring in a human hand for this purpose rather than programme the thing proves its worth. The drums breathe. They push and pull with the kind of organic imprecision that no grid-quantised machine can replicate, anchoring the more spectral elements — the organs sighing and swelling, the synthesisers lifting off into something approaching the devotional — without ever deflating them.

And then the funk section arrives, and the whole enterprise briefly becomes something else entirely. It is, as the artist themselves describes it, "dancey," which is underselling it with admirable British modesty. It arrives like a plot twist you didn't see coming but which, in retrospect, was the only logical conclusion. The cinematic tension breaks, the dust clears, and suddenly the imaginary film this music is soundtracking turns out to have a rather good ending.

Recorded between Raygun Studios and a home setup through what sounds like extensive and honest creative struggle — the artist speaks of reworking ideas repeatedly until things felt *solid* — the production wears its effort invisibly. It sounds considered without sounding laboured, which is the whole game, really.

Brighton has always been a peculiar creative pressure cooker: hedonistic and introspective in equal measure, cosmopolitan enough to absorb everything and parochial enough to alchemise it into something local and strange. "I'd Rather Fly" feels like a product of that tension. It is not looking for a fight. It is not chasing a trend. It is simply standing at the edge of something vast, watching the light change, and putting that sensation into four or five minutes of music with remarkable precision.

Niche, the artist admits. And yes — this will not bother the streaming algorithms or register with radio programmers hunting for the next polished confection. But niche, let us be absolutely clear, is not a diminishment. Niche is where the interesting work gets done, away from the committee rooms and the quarterly targets and the focus-grouped chorus structures. Niche is where people who actually care about sound make things that actually last.

"I'd Rather Fly" is not a single that announces itself with fireworks. It announces itself with a long, slow, knowing look. Give it the attention it's quietly demanding. You'll find it repays the investment rather handsomely.