Listeners familiar with the pair’s other work will appreciate the style. Part of dream pop duo Starover Blue, Sallay-Milotz has made her name weaving rich soundscapes, while the sombre tone is present across the oeuvre of Rudick’s Young Elk. We have previously described the Young Elk sound as “unapologetically bleak,” but where some acts wear their misery as a kind of costume, Rudick has always emerged convincing and compelling, his straightforward delivery and nuanced writing lending an authenticity to the mood that makes it all the more moving. Darkness not as some performative fancy but rather a deeper engagement with all that’s unsettling and sad.

Latest single ‘Elora’ highlights how The Slow Sound is not only a marriage of these sensibilities, but something a little more too. The track emerged from a strange experience while rewatching Willow as an adult, the premise of the film suddenly terrifying and odd. Sluggish synths punch through an ethereal haze, a sound which reproduces the television’s trick of conjuring distance and intimacy simultaneously.

Lift your eyes to the sky
don’t let this infant die
does someone out here know where evil hides?

The song comes complete with a suitably eerie video directed and edited by the band themselves. Taking inspiration from eighties horror VHS tapes, the footage captures something of the track’s hypnotic lo-fi textures, the spectral light of the screen casting everything a little peculiar and removed.

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