Just Kids

Three years after their Moshi Moshi release The Things We Made London/Galicia’s All Cats are bBautiful return with a heartbreaking offering of love and loss. 

Detailing the deeply tragic loss of Ky’s partner of a decade in 2021 and their struggle through the grief and guilt in the subsequent years, the record opens with the rolling and hopeful no wave ballad living a life on splitscreen, a bass driven narrative of travels along the highways of LA listening to avant garde music in the summer sun, written the year before the tragedy occurred.

Suddenly, out of the hazy analogue synth cloud of splitscreen’s outro, we’re thrust headlong into the world of worst nightmares coming true. half of u’s short run-time only compounds the song’s stark l honesty, just as its rich and almost overwhelming instrumentation reaches into the immense pain of losing your closest love in such shocking circumstances:

‘its like someone got inside and split my body in two
cause i don't even know who i am
unless i am half of you’

The desperately beautiful chords of the opening synths and following grand piano of if only i cld bless ur bones, all recorded in the middle of the night in Dalston’s Earth Theatre some time in 2023, carry with them the haunted longing of someone, in Ky’s words:

’falling off the edge of the
world reaching for you
and i ain’t gonna lie it scares me’

The song dips and meanders through pet names and promises, impotent wishes and cries for release, before exploding into a gloriously painful wail and simmering back down to a gentle acoustic guitar figure.

i jst wanna b in ur love feels just as spectral and ghostly as bless ur bones but seems to have the gravity of a soul that is reluctantly - if not accepting their fate, learning how to live with it in a world where the thing they loved the most has gone. rising up to a tidal wave of tremolo guitars and pulsing floor toms, with the heart-wrenching refrain of the song’s title leading us out into a void, each instrument seems to fizzle or dip from existence.

The record ends with the guitar driven b next 2 water, a beautifully dense tone-poem of a song showcasing the duo's skills as songwriters of vivid emotional poignancy, ending with a pulsing backbeat as the guitars throb and thrash like waves crashing in over your head.

‘it was always on my mind
like i carried it inside
my belly with butterflies
im reaching up like i photosynthesise’

With this record we see not only the return of the elaborately textured queer pop of all cats are beautiful - with their delightful forays into the soundscapes of contemporary classical alongside glitchy electronica and r’n’b - but a return to the familiar old stories that made up their first couple of EPs: namely loss, grief, longing, and how we lean on each other to carry ourselves through unimaginable pains.

Mainly it's just a record about the deepest kind of love, a love that transcends all else - ‘cause as we all have to learn, grief is just love with no place left to go. 

For fans of Bon Iver, Arthur Russell, Phoebe Bridgers