The opening is disarmingly tender. Piano and strings move together in small, hushed phrases, close to Max Richter in their patience, and for a few bars you could be forgiven for thinking you had wandered into a late-night radio programme about grief. Then the floor gives way. Heavy guitars arrive at full weight, the strings lift into a wide, aching climb, and a drum programme stomps in that owes more to industrial hip-hop than to any rock textbook. It is gritty, exact and faintly menacing. The nearest reference points are the pitch's own: Mick Gordon's demonic precision and the machine-shop grind of Nine Inch Nails, with strings that would not embarrass a film composer.
What keeps the track from becoming a stunt is Miočić's ear for proportion. The piano is not the quiet cousin at the wedding, the beats are not garnish, and the guitars are not the loud lodger who takes over the house. Each element gets to be the centre of gravity in turn, then hands over without a fuss. Around the two-minute mark the storm parts and brighter keys meet a twangier guitar tone, a short spell of sunlight that changes the emotional weather before the strings and lead guitar return for a reprise that sounds hard won. Forgiveness, the track suggests, is not a single feeling but an argument with several sides, and it is conducted with commendable range.
The engineering deserves applause of its own. Genre hybrids of this kind usually collapse into mud, as orchestral samples, downtuned riffs and programmed drums fight over the same low-mid frequencies. Here everything is enormous and yet each part can be heard. The strings keep their bow-hair texture, the piano keeps its air, and the percussion hits with the clean, hard edge of someone who has watched a thousand front-of-house meters and knows where the danger is. The relentless groove never bullies the melody, which is the harder trick.
A church bell closes the piece, one stroke of theatre after a great deal of noise. It is a nicely judged gesture, a full stop that reads as either a truce or a benediction, depending on your temperament.
Instrumental music with no vocal hook is a hard sell, and Miočić does not pretend otherwise. He trusts melody, dynamics and sheer nerve to hold the listener, and they do. Those who like their cinematic rock heavy, their neoclassicism unafraid of a distortion pedal and their industrial beats with a conscience will find "Forgiveness" a generous, muscular and quietly moving piece of work.
