Twelve years of silence. A long hush, long enough to let a memory settle into the earth, for the embers to gutter to dust, for water to smooth the sharp stones. Silence, yes, but nothing is ever gone, not really. Manchester’s cult heroes WU LYF return. ‘A New Life is Coming’ – their first words in over a decade.
Six minutes stretch out, as one slow draw, a deep inhale before the plunge. Twelve years might have been enough for them to slip free of old skin, to moult, and to forget. And yet, here is the same ghostlight glow that flickered through ‘Go Tell Fire to the Mountain’, now drifting ashore in 2025. “Old friends with new scars, trying not to aggravate the wounds of yesterday. We are all surprised by the big music that still plays itself through us, an unexpected gift after the longest exile. A gleaming fragment of then, magnified by who we are now,” the band explains.
Softness first, then force. The build, the weight, and the exhale into huge stabs that bring about WU LYF’s anthemic sound, crashing back down, scattering spray to the sky. The vocals at first delicate, then cracking open into cries of unshackled yelps. A voice that has waited too long, pressing against the surface, bursting through. It’s undeniably pretty, the way the mist catches the light before it disappears.
A new life is coming. It was always coming.
Photo by Jonathan Flanders
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