Ahead of the debut full-length release from London-based band Guise, here is the upbeat single ‘Don’t Come Back’. Full of catchy hooks and hummable melody, this is the sort of up-tempo song that makes you want to dance and sing along. Over an irresistible strum and foot-tapping beat, lead singer Jess Guise delivers a typically tuneful vocal with lovely backing from co-vocalist Laura Hanna. As the song grows and Guise really lets loose, she demonstrates real purity, power, range and control with her voice. Lukas Drinkwater enhances the song with his upright bass and a gorgeous, insistent acoustic guitar solo. Sonically uplifting, ‘Don’t Come Back’ is about relationships that burn brightly before unravelling just as quickly, and staying strong as you move on. Jess Guise says of the single: “This isn’t a song about one particular person so much as a string of disastrous decisions. It’s about the brutal transience and sheer depressing turnover of romantic entanglements I found myself in living in London during my 20s, and about crashing headlong into people who just bounce off and bounce along like dodgems. It’s also about sometimes being the dodgem myself, and not giving myself too much of a hard time about it.”
‘Don’t Come Back’ is the first single taken from the forthcoming new album, ‘Youngest Daughter’, which is due for release next week on 29th April 2022. The song nearly didn’t make it onto the album but Jess Guise was persuaded by her husband Frank Turner who also produced the record. Put together during the pandemic and overcoming all the complications that came with remote collaboration, it’s a very personal album, as Jess explains: “Youngest Daughter is a (mostly) autobiographical, story-so-far record. It’s home to memories and moments spanning decades of my life; it includes some songs I’ve been carrying around safely in my back pocket for years, and others that I’ve recently finished and am throwing straight out into the world. It’s an honest, personal, and self-deprecating wander through the various ways I’ve tried to follow my heart over the years. It seems appropriate that a record about fumbling towards the good things was a bit of a fumble to make itself, and holds little pieces of our musical journey in its nooks and crannies.” As well as this single, the album also features the beautiful ‘Brother in Arms’, perhaps the only video to ever bring a tear to this reviewer’s eye.
Throughout May, Guise will be promoting the new album on a UK tour in support of Will Varley. Check out the album and catch the band live. While you wait, dance along to ‘Don’t Come Back’.
