The South London songwriter has form for wearing his influences on his sleeve without ever sounding derivative, and here the ghosts of Blind Faith's aching balladry and Peter Gabriel's widescreen art-pop hover somewhere in the mix without ever crowding it out. What Garside does with those reference points, though, is entirely his own: he takes the descending-then-ascending chord logic of the verses—a neat musical metaphor for the mood swings at the song's emotional core—and builds around it an ensemble that sounds less like a backing band and more like a small international expedition. Which, in a sense, it is.

The rhythmic engine here deserves special mention. The interplay between bodhran and conga-and-shaker percussion gives the track a loping, propulsive gait that never quite lets you settle—there's always forward motion, always the sense of swimming rather than sinking. It's a clever bit of arrangement thinking: rather than illustrating depression with dirge-like plod, Garside and his collaborators build momentum into the very bones of the song, so that the music itself embodies the record's central message before a single lyric has landed.

Sonically, the production wisely resists the temptation to drown everything in reverb. Instead it opts for a spacious, "big room" clarity that lets the Hammond B3 swell and recede like weather, lets the double bass sit warm and rounded in the low end, and lets those ethereal backing vocals arrive like light finally breaking through cloud cover at the chorus. It's an unfussy, analogue-warm sound that trusts the songwriting and the players rather than hiding behind studio trickery—a quietly countercultural choice in an era of maximalist pop production.

Lyrically, Garside earns his optimism rather than assuming it. This isn't a breezy, glib song about "good vibes only"; it's a document of having actually been somewhere very dark and having found, against the odds, a way back up. That lived-in honesty is what stops the anthemic chorus from tipping into greeting-card sentiment. There's real wit here too, tucked into the margins—a sly, character-sketch of a line about a tattoo gone hilariously wrong that suggests a writer who can hold humour and gravity in the same hand without dropping either.

What's most heartening about "Mariana Trench," though, is what it represents: a self-produced, internationally assembled record, stitched together remotely by musicians from four different countries who may never share a stage, let alone a room—and yet it sounds utterly cohesive, warm, and human. In an age of algorithmic collaboration, Garside has found genuine soul in the process. This is a single that surfaces from real depths and arrives, blinking and grateful, into the light. Recommended.