A J Green plays guitar the way the great melodic rock stylists always have: as a vocalist in disguise, every bend and sustain shaped to serve a lyric rather than upstage it. The influences are worn openly on the sleeve — you can hear the widescreen chorus-writing of Bryan Adams, the polish of Def Leppard, the bluesy ache of Gary Moore, a dash of Bon Jovi's stadium instinct and The Alarm's flag-waving conviction. But name-checking heroes is easy; earning the comparison is harder, and Green earns it by refusing to simply imitate the shapes of those records. He borrows their craftsmanship instead — the sense that a chorus should arrive like a held breath finally released, that a guitar solo should say something rather than merely demonstrate technique.

"Music Set Her Free," the single that has already found its way to over 180,000 Spotify streams and picked up radio attention well beyond these shores, is the clearest evidence of that instinct. It's built on a hook simple enough to hum after one listen, yet the arrangement underneath keeps revealing small details on repeat plays — a guitar line here, a vocal harmony there — the kind of layering that separates a song built to last from one built to trend. "Throw My Dreams Into The Sea" swings the mood toward something sunnier, a widescreen, open-road number about refusing to let ambition curdle into regret. Placed together, the two singles suggest an album confident enough to hold both light and shade without losing its own throughline.

Much of that confidence comes from the company Green keeps. Rebecca Downes lends her blues-rock voice to proceedings with the kind of soulful weight that instantly raises the emotional stakes of any track she touches, while Rick Benton — a name long associated with Magnum's keyboard textures — brings a layer of atmosphere that gives the guitar work somewhere richer to sit. Recorded across a long stretch at Mad Hat Studios, the album never feels rushed or padded; every contributor sounds genuinely invested rather than hired for the afternoon.

What ultimately makes *Before The End* rewarding isn't nostalgia, though the record certainly knows its lineage. It's the sincerity underneath the polish — songs about hope, reflection, love and the moments that quietly redefine a life, delivered without irony or self-consciousness. Rock music this openly emotional can easily tip into cliché, but Green's songwriting stays grounded because the feeling behind it never seems manufactured. This is an album that plays like the culmination of a long musical apprenticeship, guitar-driven rock with genuine heart, melody built to outlast the season it was released in, and a songwriter fully at home in his own voice.