Stereo Embers’ TRACK OF THE DAY: Withered Hand’s “Feelings”

Breaking a nearly ten-year silence, Withered Hand are back.

Singer/songwriter Dan Willson is one of the most inventive and incisive lyricists out there and the Scottish band’s new single is deeply affecting.

Filled with post-punk swing and melodic smarts, “Feelings” is an aching blast of pop perfection. An open wound of a number that’s plaintive and ferocious, “Feelings” is an unflinching examination of the things we do to not feel the things we feel. “I swallowed my pride/I just want the harder stuff,” Willson writes. ”

And that sentiment is unapologetically followed up with: “My appetite anaesthetises love.”

“This cry-for-help of a song sums up years of trying to medicate uncomfortable feelings with whatever I could get my hands on. If the album opens with this car crash, then the rest of the songs on ‘How To Love’ are imbued with my attempts to keep stumbling away from living like that,” Willson tells SEM. “My own mental health struggles in the past meant life got really dark before I was willing to surrender three years ago and become willing to learn to live sober. It’s a healthy catharsis rocking out with the band on this song though, repaying a debt to some of the harder music I grew up with in the 90s.”

Taken from the band’s new winning long player How To Love, “Feelings” heralds the return of one of the great practitioners of modern song.

<a href="https://witheredhand.bandcamp.com/album/how-to-love-album-2023">How To Love (Album,2023) by Withered Hand</a>