The title suggests heartbreak, the well-worn currency of pop songwriting since time immemorial. But Eliyanah is cleverer than that. This isn’t a post-mortem; it’s a pulse check, caught in the giddy, terrified moment before anything has gone wrong at all. “I need you here tonight,” she sings, and the line lands with the breathless urgency of somebody dialling a number they know they shouldn’t, if only because they can’t quite help themselves. It’s a neat inversion of the breakup song, and a smart one \u2014 the anxiety of falling for someone is rendered here with just as much drama as the anxiety of losing them, arguably more, because nothing has happened yet and everything still could.<\/p>
Producer Hugh Fothergill, best known for his work alongside David Gray, deserves enormous credit for the record’s architecture. The verses are kept lean and confiding, almost conversational, built around a guitar tone that owes as much to vintage feedback pedals as it does to anything you’d find on a contemporary pop session. Then the chorus arrives and the whole thing blooms \u2014 synths stacking, the bassline pushing forward with real conviction \u2014 without ever tipping into the sort of maximalist gloss that swallows a vocal whole. Eliyanah’s voice, strong and unshowy, is allowed to do the heavy lifting, and it repays the trust handsomely: soulful without straining for it, vulnerable without collapsing into whisper-pop clich\u00e9.<\/p>
Co-written with her brother Simon in a cramped West London studio, the song wears its intimacy lightly. You can hear the closeness of that collaboration in the lyric’s specificity \u2014 this isn’t generic romantic shorthand but the particular, slightly embarrassing detail of actually falling for someone: the fear of coming on too strong, the fear of not saying enough, the small, private hope that this one might be different. Fans of Holly Humberstone or The Japanese House will recognise the emotional register immediately, but Eliyanah brings a directness to the songwriting that feels distinctly her own \u2014 less interested in mood for its own sake than in getting the feeling exactly right.<\/span><\/p> What ultimately elevates “Another Regret” above a good deal of current indie-pop is its refusal to resolve. The song ends much as it begins: hopeful, unguarded, uncertain of the outcome. That restraint is its own kind of confidence. Plenty of songwriters would have reached for a tidy bow, a lesson learned, a moral delivered. Eliyanah leaves the window open instead, and the draught that comes through it is thrilling.<\/span><\/p> At under three minutes, tight and built for late-night drives with the windows down, “Another Regret” marks a sharp, assured return from an artist who clearly took her time away seriously. On this evidence, the wait was worth it \u2014 and the promised debut album can’t come soon enough.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\nhttps:\/\/eliyanah.me\/home<\/a>\n\n\n\n\n
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