It opens with a riff that bounces rather than strides, a springy little figure that suggests a childhood bicycle freewheeling down a hill in late August. The guitars have a rubbery, slightly wonky charm, the sort that makes you grin before you've understood why. Over the top drifts a vocal so soft-focused it seems to have been recorded through a net curtain. The words arrive in fragments and half-gestures, never quite landing but never quite leaving. You lean in to catch them and the song, mischievously, leans back.
That push and pull is the secret of the thing. The cheerfulness of the rhythm never agrees with the melancholy of the voice, and the two circle each other for the better part of four minutes. Each new layer of guitar, each shimmer of reverb, each faint harmonic ghost drawn across the mix thickens the atmosphere a little more. It is the musical equivalent of watching fog roll in across a familiar street. Nothing is hidden yet everything is altered, and what felt like fond reminiscence starts to curdle, gently, into grief. Nostalgia has rarely sounded so unreliable, or so honest about its own deceptions.
Patience is the song's great virtue. Skiptrace let the spiral tighten far longer than most young bands would dare, trusting the listener to stay inside the haze with them. Then the whole arrangement gives way and the band lets rip. The guitars rise into a vast, roaring, many-layered blur, a cathedral built from feedback, and above it the lead lines wail like something finally allowed to say what it has been swallowing. It recalls the great shoegaze catharses of the early nineties, when bands such as Slowdive and Ride understood that volume could be a form of tenderness. Yet Skiptrace never sound like students of the genre. The ferocity is hard-won, earned by all that careful restraint, and it lands with real emotional force.
Credit is due to the production, which handles the dynamics with admirable poise. Too many debut acts, handed a big finale, mistake loudness for feeling and bludgeon the listener into submission. Here the noise serves the song. The quiet verses make the roar feel inevitable, and the roar makes the quiet verses feel haunted in retrospect. It is a trick as old as the electric guitar, performed with uncommon grace.
The title, meanwhile, is a small masterstroke of irony. "Rest assured" is what we say when we have no certainty to offer, a phrase of comfort worn thin by overuse. Set against music this unsettled and unresolved, it takes on a double meaning that is both consoling and quietly devastating. You may find yourself reassured and bereft in the same breath.
As the last single before the album arrives, "rest assured" works as both summation and provocation. It declares that Skiptrace can write a hook, build a mood, and tear a roof off, all within a single sprawling song. If the rest of the record is half as bewitching, this could be one of the debuts of the year. For now, it is a strange, glorious piece of pop-adjacent heartache, and it has already taken up residence in my head.