Solace is an album about pain and love, tackling the issues of mental health and racism through an emo-influenced brand of alternative folk. Some of the tracks, such as opener ‘Joseph’, play like frenetic rock songs, while others, like ‘Capacity’, are slow and dark and brooding. Walker’s lyrics are often simple and melodramatic, written without poetic flourish, like blunt and truthful diary entries.

The title track plays like laid back folk with both emo and country tinges, the vocals plain and confessional throughout the verses though building into cathartic choruses ruled by alienation, isolation and melancholy.

“Could you feel
in your empathy?
Look at their pain
and find beauty.
I can’t live like
like you want to.
I can’t live like
you want me to”

‘Heart’ emerges warmer and more hopeful, the proverbial new dawn, while ‘Cruel’ morphs across it’s length into an alt-rock anthem. Other notable songs include ‘I Hope It Ends One Day’, a powerful meditation on racism where Walker’s subtle guitar plays behind a spoken word sample from his grandmother, and the striped back ‘They Don’t Want us to Live’ with only acoustic guitar, piano and backing vocals from Olivia Price of Fossil Jane.

Single ‘It Hurts’ represents Walker at what could perhaps be his best, fierce folk which rises into rock by the very momentum of his words.

“We are the slaves of a desperate past
It’s memories like this that we’ll always look past
It’s the scars that touch our bones
That will always hit home
It’s the memories within
That’ll leave our skin

It hurts
To know the truth”

This is music from someone sick and tired, someone beat-down and furious with the things they see and experience every day, a person making a decision as to what to accept and what to fight in the ultimate hope that things can change. And forget genre, or sound, or influences, forget whether you’d prefer your songwriting less forceful and melodramatic, because this is the sort art the world needs. The sort of artist.

There’s plenty to get down about, plenty to hate or fear or ignore, and the solution isn’t going to be found in hashtags or think-pieces. The answer, I think, lies in human connection, in empathy. In realising that despite it all, there are people out there feeling the exact same way, or else worse in ways you can’t begin to image. For all of its doubt and anger, and whether he is aware of it or not, A Day Without Love is some sort of attempt at this, a kind of starting point. Taking a quote from the beginning of ‘Too Fast’ as his mission statement:

“You’re still not alone in the world. You just have to believe there’s a power greater than yourself.”

Solace is out now and you can buy it on CD from Sounds and Tones Records and digitally from the A Day Without Love Bandcamp page.

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