By The Sea // I See A Crystal Sky

By The Sea, Wirral’s forefathers of ‘escape pop’ (as they call it themselves), have always been masters at marrying the melancholic with the melodic, but new track ‘I See A Crystal Sky’ is a full-on paean to desolation: it revels in it and celebrates it rather than simply acknowledging its inevitability.

It’s perhaps no surprise then that there’s something triumphant about ‘I See A Crystal Sky’. There’s a rich seam of euphoria running through the track from the noodling hook of a riff that opens it, right through to the yawning, almost hymn-like bass, and the swelling of a synth that punctuates front-man Liam Power’s declaration that “I see a crystal sky/and hear the echo die.”

Their debut album was one of our favourites of 2012 (and surely one of the year’s most criminally under-appreciated), but ‘I See A Crystal Sky’ suggests that they’ve wrapped their surreal melodies around something sparser on their coming second LP, Endless Days, Crystal Sky – which is out August 18th. Consider us majorly excited after this introduction.