Far below the candyfloss, stadium-filling pop-pap, the saccharine sentiments, the airbrushed idealism, the depthless, vacuous transience of social media, there’s the music that MUST be made, words that MUST come out, regardless of whether anyone is listening. The artists who make these songs voluntarily exist in the shadows, away from the noise and the spotlights; for it is here that an integral tranquillity allows them to reflect on the unvarnished reality of human existence.

The Declining Winter’s Last April is not a heart-on-your-sleeve record. It does away with the sleeve and goes straight for carving a heart on the arm. An album which emerged out of a period of shock, grief and trauma, its six songs were all written on the same night and form a stately tribute to a loved one lost. Most of us have been here, of course - these are universal themes - we all experience loss, grief, heartbreak and we all have our own ways of coping. “It doesn’t get better, it gets different” a friend assured me in the wake of my own father’s passing and no truer words were spoken.

While their previous album (2023’s Really Early, Really Late) was lush, ornate and featuring a wide array of instrumentation, Last April strips things back to just Richard Adams’ plaintive voice and acoustic guitar, alongside the beautiful, irrefutably melancholy string arrangements/playing of Sarah Kemp (Brave Timbers). There’s been no attempt to plane off any rough edges - here and there, the creak of a chair, a guitar note missed, a voice almost cracking with emotion - these recordings are like cathartic scrawls in a diary. Only this one has been left out for anyone to read.

Following in the tradition of emotionally raw albums - Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, Songs: Ohia’s Didn’t It Rain, Red House Painters’ Down Colorful Hill come to mind - the space in between the notes is just as important as the notes themselves. As with his previous band, Hood, Adams has a way of evoking a particularly pastoral, English melancholy, of lonely morning hikes in inclement weathers, of rain on slate in the West Yorkshire streets where he was raised and still lives.

Last April is a monument to a loved one, a monument that, much like stone, will outlive us all. There’s comfort in that and in that, whoever might hear it, they might feel a little less alone. This is an album that exists simply because it has to.