Sadness & Complete Disappointment, Survivor’s Guilt
Self-release

Don’t fall in love. Unless it’s with Sadness & Complete Disappointment, because latest single Survivor’s Guilt is perhaps their most powerful offering yet. The third single taken from their upcoming EP, Fun, which is due out in March, Survivor’s Guilt is as gloomy and glorious as S&CD have ever been.

There’s a hymn-like quality to Survivor’s Guilt, in the meandering finger-picked guitar line and soaring up in an unholy crescendo of a chorus. Esme’s vocal performance is hauntingly impassioned start to finish, whether in the verses’ delicate poetics or the mesmerising howl that grows throughout – Survivor’s Guilt is equal parts introspection, intent, and intensity, and Esme’s liquid-silver delivery is a flawless vessel to weave this story.

As the song lilts onwards, the inevitably looming decay of love rears its head as the reason S&CD plead with us “don’t fall in love.” Desperately reflective lyrics deal in vulnerability and the anxieties of giving yourself to someone else – inspired in part by an experience that Esme had with an ex-girlfriend. “She walked me to her house in Brixton once and told me that I couldn’t come in. “This is my house and you’ll never see inside” she said and she laughed. But I did see inside and I saw so deep inside her head and her mind and inside there was NOTHING.” The fear of emptiness is just as stifling as the fear of vulnerability, and this is the fine line that Survivor’s Guilt tries to navigate through luscious melancholy and sweeping despair.

Sadness & Complete Disappointment live up to their name with this latest release – deliriously pessimistic, bleak, but still sharing a glimmer of hope just because it’s so emotionally alive. Their EP Fun is out in March – it looks like it’s going to be hopelessly, deliciously sad, but far from disappointing.

Fun is out March 5th.