Halkerston is 26, a former Royal Navy submariner, and a man who — by his own account — had never sung a note nor touched a production console before 2024. This biographical detail is not incidental. It explains everything about *Anodyne*: its roughness, its courage, and its complete indifference to the conventions that more formally trained musicians spend years either learning or unlearning. He arrived at music the way the best artists usually do — not through ambition but through necessity, recording into his phone in the small hours, finding in melody what conversation couldn't provide.

The shadow of the 1990s falls across this record, and Halkerston wears his influences with admirable transparency. Alice In Chains' *Jar of Flies* — that strange, hushed detour from a band known for crushing riffs — is clearly the presiding spirit here. The acoustic intimacy, the willingness to let heaviness be implied rather than stated, runs through *Anodyne* like a fault line. Yo La Tengo's *Painful* lends its atmospheric patience: the spaces between notes are used not as rest but as argument, the silence doing as much emotional work as anything Halkerston plays. And Radiohead's *The Bends* — still perhaps the greatest record about the terror of feeling too much — gives him permission for those imperfect, exposed vocals, pitched somewhere between confession and collapse.

The vocals deserve particular attention. Halkerston recorded in a shared house, unable to project beyond conversational volume, and so he did something that many technically accomplished singers never manage: he learned to make constraint into character. There is a quality to his voice — breathy, textured, intimate — that functions almost like a whispered secret. You lean in. The music leans back. It is an entirely accidental innovation that produces entirely deliberate results.

That all instruments were played and recorded live, with no programming, no pitch correction, is not merely a philosophical stance — it is audible. The record breathes like a living thing. Small imperfections accumulate into personality, the way imperfections always do in people you come to love. A note slightly bent in the wrong direction. A vocal phrase that catches at its edges. These are not flaws. They are fingerprints.

Halkerston also painted the cover artwork himself — a fact mentioned almost as an afterthought in the accompanying press materials, and yet somehow entirely consistent with the spirit of the record. *Anodyne* is the product of a person who, having lost several of the things that defined him — military service, a long relationship, a stable sense of self — rebuilt an identity from scratch using only whatever materials were close to hand. That process, in the best possible sense, is exactly what you hear.

The EP's emotional territory is grief, dislocation, and the particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too much but from not knowing who you are anymore. Halkerston navigates this without self-pity and without false resolution. No track arrives at the easy comfort that its title promises. *Anodyne* soothes nothing. It simply sits with you, which, when you consider what this music cost to make, is the more generous and honest thing to do.

A debut of rare integrity. Watch this space with some urgency.