amilost featured highly in our Top 40 songs of 2024 listing with their power ballad-cum-cinematic anthem ‘Tiny War’, which turns out to be the first track on their new EP, along with other previous singles, ‘Bloom’, ‘Haunted’ and ‘Afterthought’.
They are Norwegian singer and writer Sigrid Zeiner-Gundersen and Scottish drummer Ross Craib, who are currently London-based.
Relationship breakdowns are their forte (musically I mean, I know nothing of their private lives!) and this new EP ‘Chapters of a Heartbreak’, released on May 7th via Swedish label Icons Creating Evil Art, looks like it could their personal manual on the subject. ‘Split-ups for Dummies’, perhaps.
If not that, they might be taking up from where Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë left off.
It’s a five-track EP that does actually read like the chapters of a breakup, progressing from the stark bleakness of “I don’t how to love you any more” bit by bit towards a rediscovery of meaning and purpose.
You do get the impression they were born in the wrong era. This sort of stuff would have gone down a storm in the 18th and 19th centuries and you can easily envisage Colin Firth and Keira Knightley acting out their traditional roles to it.
The press release urges a focus on the final single from the EP, ‘I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,’ so I’ll oblige accordingly.
There have of course been many recordings of songs with that title, the original Burt Bacharach ‘Promises, Promises’ musical song dating to 1968 and ably performed over the years by the likes of Dionne Warwick and Deacon Blue.
I often think it can be dangerous to play around with such historical titles but amilost put their individual stamp onto a quite different song altogether to put plenty of distance between it and any faux ‘predecessors’.
It’s a part-pop/part-R&B number which oozes smoochiness when perhaps the subject matter doesn’t need it. What struck my attention particularly was an interesting percussion part by Ross Craib, who certainly knows his rhythms.
I had a quick listen to the other tracks and the styles vary. Most are slow burners but ‘Haunted’ and to a lesser degree ‘Bloom’ do build up a head of steam into little rockers.
‘Tiny War’ remains the most attractive track for me and it is quite exceptional but the production values across all five of them are very high. I love the way ‘Tiny War’ segues into ‘Haunted’ as if they are two parts of the same song, which I suppose they are. Relationships are like that, aren’t they?
EP score: 7.5/10
Incidentally, I just remembered we did a review of ‘Afterthought’ in March, see:
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