Their fourth studio album is a paradoxical exploration, the band more gritty and dynamic than ever before.

Gritty and anthemic, ‘Only You Left’ marks the triumphant comeback of the Manchester-based band The Orielles. Released through Heavenly Recordings, ‘Only You Left’ is their fourth studio album, an exploratory venture that feels more meticulous and dynamic than ever before. The album blends guitarist Henry Wade’s shoegaze guitar melodies and Sidonie B. Hand-Halford’s pummelling drums, with Esmé Dee Hand-Halford’s delicate vocals and guiding bass, cultivating an album complete with dualisms. ‘Only You Left’ thrives on its paradoxes, embracing disorder and ambiguity through a collaboration that has developed over nearly fifteen years.

Recorded in two locations – Hamburg and Hydra – ‘Only You Left’ absorbs the atmosphere of its contrasting locales. As vocalist Esmé explains, “We had this vague imagery of wood versus metal. Hamburg was metal and Hydra was wood.” The album’s opener, ‘Three Halves’, embodies this fusion of man-made and natural. Crashing drums and power chords introduce the song, with a freeze pedal sustaining dystopic guitar notes. As the track unfolds, Esmé’s higher octave vocals, alongside the refrain “until you are divine”, create a striking counterpoint to the heavier instrumentation beneath. ‘Three Halves’ showcases the band’s ability to blend disparate qualities into a cohesive whole, revealing that the man-made and the natural are more intertwined than they appear. The album’s longest track, ‘Tears Are’, pushes these experimental contradictions further. This sprawling epic shifts in tone, melody, pace and vocal style; a celebration of the band’s musicianship. Esmé’s grimy pre-chorus bass riff yields to the chorus’ gentler guitar melodies, a refusal to confine the track to a single emotional register. Whispered phrases, like “sympathetic shapes upon your face” and “I drop, but I can’t fall”, foster intimacy before being swept away by Henry’s expressive guitar solo. Concluding with a charming acoustic line and the question, “Are you hopeful that love can be?”, the song captures emotionality in all its nuances, from cataclysms to tenderness. It is typical of an album unbound by convention, unified by its embrace of the polarities that shape human experience.”

These defiant dualisms extend beyond the contrasting instrumentation and vocal style. Written during a series of intense sessions in 2023-2024, ‘Only You Left’ is meticulously crafted, with each member contributing to its layered sound. Despite this precision, lyrical inversions and wordplay in tracks like ‘Wasp’ and ‘Shadow of You Appears’ add an element of ambiguity and uncertainty, leaving interpretation open to the listener. ‘All in Metal’ stands as the band’s most conventionally rock track, enriched by Esmé’s echoing, teasing refrain “no tomorrow, not today”.  The track adopts a surrealistic quality, especially in the chorus line, “the dream is only the dream if you can have it forever”, which confronts the fragility of fantasies. Culminating in a whammy guitar riff and soaring violin, the track creates a dream-like pull, drawing the listener in and out of contemplation, before landing on the reality: “Only the dream lasts forever.”

This turn toward the ethereal and the illusory continues into ‘The Woodland Has Returned’ and ‘Ember’. The former sees the band adopt a retrospective lyricism, with phrases like ‘I was lucky to face you, could have had my back to you”, whilst maintaining a level of surreal mystery through lines like “in reverie of days” and “spent spinning in the berry soup”. Reminiscent of the fantastical and spellbinding tone of Jacques Demy’s vivid ‘Donkey Skin’, ‘The Woodland Has Returned’ serves as a comforting fable and a visionary journey into the unknown.

‘Only You Left’ is a bold, atmospheric album that erupts through dynamic instrumentation, anchored by Esmé’s evocative vocals. On ‘You Are Eating A Part of Yourself’, The Orielles expose their most intimate selves. Touching on these all-consuming feelings of death and decay, this glitch-laden track wrestles with the fading contours of memory. Rising synths and jangling strings build to a roaring climax, before receding, leaving only Esmé’s echoing vocals singing, “You’re choosing a side, you don’t really like.” The album’s closer, ‘To Undo the World Itself’, distils the experimental spirit of ‘Only You Left’. Opening with a quasi-ritualistic chant and Sidonie’s hypnotic rhythmic drumline, the song lulls the listener as Esmé laments, “Are you the other part of me?” Like the rest of the album, the track crescendos to a powerful finale. Paired with the reverb-soaked vocals, ‘To Undo the World Itself’ captures the band’s intention to “lean into the beauty of sadness.”

Throughout ‘Only You Left’, The Orielles navigate contrasts – sparsity and fullness, quietness and aggression, man-made and natural, metal and wood. Despite their return to a more stripped-back, song-centred approach, The Orielles’ new release pulses with energy, charged by rich instrumentation, abstract lyricism and an unapologetic embrace of paradox.