Circa highschool, some three-odd years ago.
I slid my punch card into the time clock one last time, and the digits read like a cipher: You made it out! In a strange ecdysis, I tore myself out of a hibernation body, limb from limb until I was shiny-new. I shook myself out a premature resignation to an ‘obligatory’ fugue state of living mechanically, uncolored. Seventeen years young, I remembered how to lust for life. I rediscovered the blistering sun and the softness of geosmin. Ignited, I ducked my head into my mother’s SUV, saying “I’m lucky to be alive. I wanna be alive.”
“I wanna be alive,” Billy Woodhouse and Elliot Dryden whisper on the opening track of into a pretty room (2025), “alive.” Someone’s clumsy hands gradually fall into rhythm on an acoustic piano. The sweet, crystalline melody spills out like a popped egg yolk, coursing over Billy and Elliot’s affected, bug-like ‘dulcet tones.’ This cliché, deemed unfit in any other instance, epitomizes Woodhouse and Dryden’s chemistry and timbre. As the Lots of Hands vocalists’ improvisatory hums began to layer during my first encounter with “alive,” I reclined in my chair, tears pricking my eyes. I was transported back to an ordinary day when I, too, realized “I wanna be alive.”
Newcastle duo Lots of Hands released the bleeding, weeping, breathing being of a record, into a pretty room, on January 17, 2025. It is overwhelmingly gentle and honest, and though stylistically diverse, it thematically hearkens back repeatedly to the sense of hope bursting from its opening track. Billy and Elliot’s fourth album is a DIY œvre, a humble and authentic mess of unguarded melancholy and gratitude that radiates outward. All of its nuanced, complex feelings are deftly sewn through with a tangible desire to embrace life, allowing it to become a testament to — and a dedicated sonic embodiment of — the beauty found through making peace with grief and anguish.
Track ten is the project’s best, sustaining a sense of timelessness for the entire record. Titled “Backseat 30,” it’s a genre-fusing, emotionally supercharged masterpiece. Two UK dudes with the vocal dexterity of Midwest emo crooners are backed by a heart-wrenching banjo riff; a pillow-filled, electronically echoed kick; and a slightly detuned string section. ¾ of the way through the song, an electric guitar roars into the foreground as an article of punctuation for the song, cathartic though fleeting. Each instrument seems to call out, embodied and yearning. Lyrically, it’s only fair to allow Bill and Elliot to speak for themselves on this track, as it presents some of the finest songwriting on the album:
i don’t wanna waste my life up
yeah i wanna take this journey
and i wanna feel so worthy
hitting the backseat 30
the kids will know my name
i’ll hear them when they say
alright alright alright
alright alright alright
i don’t wanna lay my cards down
yeah i wanna get so lucky
and i’ll take the crowd back with me
hitting the backseat 30
lyrics, “backseat 30.” art, into a pretty room promotional art (2025).
Lots of Hands is sick of weighing risks, and a readthrough of “Backseat 30” illuminates the subsurface value of this frustration: living in regret is a far worse fate than not living at all. Track six, “masquerade,” expresses similar sentiments. Pouring out between echoes of twangy strum and slide guitars, are Billy and Elliot singing questions to the audience that ultimately urge us to eke out authenticity above all else.
do you see through
if you do
they’re always droning bullshit
i don’t have any time for it
a lifeless hippodrome here […]
do you see through
if you do
we intertwine.
lyrics, “masquerade.” art, into a pretty room (2025).
Even the experimental instrumental track twelve, “fun and loving,” has an insatiable appetite for life. It spins out persistently, constantly tacking on vocal samples remixed into varying degrees of tinny excited highs and enveloping low basses. It glues in field recordings of miscellaneous creaks and drips alongside dabbles on the warm low range of a piano. On paper, these components may seem disconnected and unremarkable, but on “fun and loving” they are effortlessly blended into an aural atmosphere of potential and vivacity.
That’s only the half of into a pretty room. The record’s holistic image of enduring joy is made possible because Billy and Elliot meticulously juxtapose it with its common origin: recovery from and gained perspective on hardship. Situated at the dead center of the record is “the rain,” a vulnerable depiction of grief. It begins with sonic glass: a fragile harmony emerges between a gentle guitar and an ever-present oscillating drone. These elements take the place of a traditional bassline and drum kit combination, thus becoming a unique grounding throughline. Atop the guitar and drone foundation, an ethereal combination of swelling, shivering synths and slightly imbalanced double-tracked vocals sparkle. It’s raw magic. And in addition to the musical artfulness, there lies a soft-spoken excruciating poem about reckoning with loss in “the rain:”
the rain will never end
it’ll haunt you like a shadow
reminders in your life
you know that i’m right here
i’ll hold your hand like amber
because death is just a word
yeah death is just a word
the feelings a reminder
of past nights in the cold
you don’t turn off the light
you leave the blind wide open
and float into the sun
oh well
lyrics and art, “the rain” (2023).
“Game of zeroes,” further explores hardship, this time ineptitude. With failed-hero similes and pleas for rest, Billy and Elliot evoke pure exhaustion in this third track off of into a pretty room. Unlike “the rain,” it possesses an Americana folk-rock sound, reminiscent of somber songwriting legend, Elliott Smith. Texturally, it’s idiosyncratic on the record: excluding the whining electric guitar, everything else is fuzzy, muffled, and flanged. It feels like some artifact of the early 2000s.
i play a game of zeroes
everyone but me will always win
just like some fake cult hero
pathetic chanting crawls up my skin
throw me a line
throw me a line
i’m getting up in time
i need my chance to sleep
give me a sign
just show me what’s right
getting over the line
lyrics and art, “game of zeroes” (2024).
As a closing, Billy and Elliot explore a breathy sonic atmosphere on the instrumental track, “Helen’s song.” Soft, consonant piano chords seem to emanate from a refurbished transistor radio, and a clear, yet novice flute line tumbles out on top, warm and youthful. As the track progresses, the pianist and the flutist create momentum, quickening the pace of cascading notes and expanding the diffuse woodwind line to new heights. It exudes longing.
If an audience member of Lots of Hands is ever too far gone, submerged in the woeful “the rain,” the heart-wrenching “rosie” or the bitter “run your mouth,” they must return to the introductory track. It encapsulates that indescribable, visceral moment of breaking out of resignation to mortality to instead find your way to something brighter: a radical hope. Into a pretty room is all about wanting, needing, to be alive.
P.S. Bless the hearts of two disheartened yet perseverant Newcastle Upon Tyne boys for opening 2025 with an alternative record sure to be unrivaled.
P.P.S. And Fire Talk, please never stop signing sonic angels.
Cover & promotional art credited by Lots of Hands to artists @beeficon and @harryprinciple1 on Instagram.
