The Bowie comparison DeAngelis himself reaches for is not mere posturing. The early Ziggy-period Bowie — all theatrical grandiosity, lyrics that bled into mythology — haunts the song's DNA without strangling it. DeAngelis has absorbed that lesson about the marriage of image and sound, of the lyric that becomes a visual even before the camera rolls. The music video, crucially, earns that ambition. Where lesser artists would illustrate their words with literal-minded imagery, DeAngelis (and whoever holds the director's eye here) understand that fire is a symbol older than recorded music itself. The visuals lean into allegory with a sureness that feels genuinely cinematic — less promotional clip, more short film with a theological argument to press.

The song itself is built on a premise both ancient and urgently felt: that material accumulation is vanity, that the world as we have constructed it is fragile kindling, and that the only thing standing between humanity and its own worst impulses is something neither quantifiable nor purchasable. DeAngelis frames this not as sermon but as reckoning — personal, searching, and at times rawly confessional. "We are all helpless to the fire," he declares, and it lands not as threat but as invitation: lay down the weight of acquisition, look to one another, look upward.

Recorded across two studios of distinct character — the Gradwell House, where The Wonder Years carved their anthems, and Musically Speaking Studios, where DeAngelis himself first found his professional footing at eighteen — the track carries the grain of both institutions. There is something in the production that honours craft without being enslaved to nostalgia; the band, drawn together across a decade of shared stages and studio floors, plays with the intuitive looseness of musicians who have nothing left to prove to each other. Billy Kennedy, ten years DeAngelis's collaborator, shapes the sonic architecture with a producer's instinct. Eric Bishop, seven years in, provides the kind of steady presence that only long familiarity breeds. Cole Herudek, the road's gift — met at the legendary Bottle and Cork — brings with him the edge of spontaneity that studio comfort can sometimes sand away.

Vocally, DeAngelis performs with restraint where lesser singers would have reached for bombast. The temptation to oversell a lyric this nakedly spiritual must be real; he resists it, and his performance is all the more powerful for the holding back. The voice does not plead — it witnesses. It stands before the fire and reports back.

DeAngelis has spoken of hope as the antidote to fear, and it is worth taking that seriously rather than dismissing it as spiritual cliché. The world, as any paying-attention adult will acknowledge, does not currently lack for occasions to feel afraid. Songs that offer not escapism but orientation — here is where we stand, here is what endures — perform a function that pop culture too rarely demands of itself. "Helpless To The Fire" demands it of itself, and largely delivers.

Not every listener will share DeAngelis's faith. But every listener will recognise the fire.

*Single out now. Recorded at Gradwell House Studios and Musically Speaking Studios, New Jersey.*