The single opens on guitar work that immediately puts you on the back foot. Choppy, angular, almost confrontational — the kind of chord voicings that Field Music have long weaponised, where you keep waiting for resolution and instead get the rug pulled, again and again, with a kind of gleeful structural cruelty. Beneath it, a bass that DIIV fans will find immediately, warmly familiar: fuzzed-out, a little woozy, carrying more emotional weight than it has any right to. And threading through the whole enterprise, a riff that genuinely sounds seasick — not in a bad way, but in the way of watching the horizon tilt from a ferry deck, that particular exhilarating nausea.

Grice has spoken of My Bloody Valentine as a touchstone, and you can hear it — not in any lazy shoegaze signalling, but in the way the electronic elements are woven rather than layered, as if the synthesisers grew there organically rather than being planted after the fact. The sparkle is real. It sits above the heavier machinery of the song like light on water above something considerably darker below.

And darker it is. *Blood Red Hills* wears its emotional subject — love and trust corroded slowly by time, not dramatically destroyed but quietly, depressingly dissolved — with admirable subtlety. This is not a breakup song. It is something worse: a song about the long, undramatic attrition that precedes the breakup, the small daily erosions that never make for good diary entries. Grice knows better than to write that story in plain language. He wraps it in energy and euphoria and a key change that by rights should not work, and yet lands with the satisfying precision of a well-thrown dart.

That key change deserves its own paragraph. It arrives when you've stopped expecting it, shifts the song into a register that feels simultaneously inevitable and audacious, and opens out into a closing section — a blizzard of a playout, dense and euphoric and slightly overwhelming — that will cause genuine physical problems for anyone attempting to listen while seated. The production is immaculate without being cold, loud without bullying.

Grice is no newcomer to this. Electric Soft Parade, Foxes!, Octopuses — his CV reads like a late-night, cult-adjacent wing of the Brighton art-pop corridor. His debut Fierce Friend album *Lies That Comfort You* (2018) earned Stuart Maconie's approval on BBC 6 Music and deserved considerably more. Eight years is a long time to wait. *Blood Red Hills* suggests those years were not wasted.

The forthcoming album, *Blood Red Hills & The Uncanny Valley*, is promised for October 2026, and that title alone — borrowing from robotics theory, that eerie almost-human valley of wrongness — suggests Grice intends to go somewhere genuinely strange. If this single is the entrance to that world, it is a compelling one: bright on the surface, unsettled beneath, and sharp enough to draw blood.

Fierce Friend is not hiding anymore. Good.