Hail The Ghost Releases A Beautiful and Heavy Single
- BuzzSlayers
- Jan 16
- 4 min read
A single release from Hail The Ghost manages to pull together such a gorgeous atmosphere while telling a story laced with intrigue, all while this musical mood is set, and it comes together in a way that wraps itself around you and has you swimming through the tones and textures that it puts out.
"Little Lungs" is quite a beautiful single, and this is because of its sentiment and storytelling, but also because of how the music comes across with a very particular sort of flow and drift to it.
The song is dream-esque, in a sense. It brings with it an expansive and spacious underbelly that sort of swallows you up.
The song begins with light percussion and synthesizers that have a little bit of a haunting quality to them. They're almost like strings. The synths sound like cellos and are drenched in different kinds of effects like reverb and even hints of delay, so that it's very wet and widespread.
This creates that vast tonality and gives you something to begin swimming through in the first place.
As it unfolds, guitars come in, and they're clean but also drifting. Everything about this song has that floating feeling to it. He creates that atmosphere that ends up being robust in the end; at the start, it is subtle and more engulfing.
The song gives you hints of everything from post-rock to post-punk, but also, again, that cinematic backbone that it leans on, giving you the sense of emotion coming through.
The combination of keys and synths with the guitars is brilliant because the textures overlap each other and help build the entire soundscape itself.
Every element and instrument on this track starts creating that mood.
The vocals come in and start telling you the story.
You have a performance that has heart to it, but also feels semi-theatrical at the same time. I like this aspect because it draws your attention quickly.
"Little lungs crying out for them to come and take you home", is how the song begins lyrically.
So, right off the bat, you're getting a sense of something or someone that's not yet placed. Or that is lost. It is something that wants to be placed, and already it's something that feels semi-relatable.
The percussion begins to grow, and the guitars get a little stronger, slightly overpowering the spacious cello-like synthesizers.
After the second verse comes, the song erupts into a much heavier soundscape.
The synthesizers that were giving you that underlying bassline are now heavier guitars, and the song is at this huge level of intensity in sonic drive.
Meanwhile, those clean guitars are still overlapping it, and the drums are now slamming.
Now you have this gigantic sound that is sort of blistering and still theatrical, but almost overwhelming.
The vocals are still sort of drifting throughout all of this, drenched in reverb, calling out lines like "Now you're not alone".
Giving more depth to the story and how someone who was beckoning to be placed has been.
I absolutely love how robust and boisterous this track gets, and I wasn't really expecting it to explode the way it did and still portray such a heavy-handed emotional backbone the way it does.
The intensity level is gigantic, and I love how the vocals still have this coming or soothing feel to it.
Maybe this is because the vocals are almost like an instrument themselves, or perhaps it's because the song is about a baby with little lungs that are calling out, so the vocals are still soft even though the music is so intense.
This whole thing was put together with such a deep thought process. Not just the arrangement, but the lyrics and storyline, how everything grows and intensity, and still portrays all of the emotion, wrapped up into one piece of music.
This is a blend of genres but sticks firmly to a lot of the post-rock aspects along with dream-rock, and again, plenty of post-punk, in my opinion.
It's that spaciousness that delivers some of the impact. So there was a lot of attention to detail in terms of how the instruments would come through sonically and tonally in the end.
It all helps that intensity level get to where it's at and lets the song's envelopment get pushed so that you have that genius combination of calming and soothing vocals, with a more edgy and heavy-handed overtone coming from the instruments.
It's an atmosphere that is definitely something you get caught up in.
Now, upon listening to the track and sort of picking it apart, we did get a message from the band themselves regarding what the song is about in more detail.
As I wasn't far off, there is more to the story and emotion that I picked up on the first few times around.
"'Little Lungs' was written from a conversational piece with the writer of track and the protagonist; a newborn baby, who is being considered for adoption. The song deals with issues of loneliness, abandonment and anger as the writer contemplates the circumstances from the newborn baby's point of view, asking, "...was it the cold white walls that spoke to you and set the temperature gauge for loneliness to come and make a home?".
O'Reilly - the band's lyricist - concludes the track with a repetitive line "..Little Lungs, you're not alone, 'cause anger made you its' home" - prompting the notion that irrespective of whether the deliberating parents returned to the child or not, that the act of leaving their newborn child for the first few months of its' life probably contributed to the lifetime of anger which followed."
I would suggest listening to this one with headphones on, as this is one of the better ways to really soak the song in, along with all of its layers, textures, and emotions that it delivers along the way.
Do not forget where you heard this first.
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