Music is by its very nature a mysterious phenomenon. The question of what drives people to make it (and what drives people to listen to it) has occupied philosophers, anthropologists and scientists for centuries. And it raises other questions, such as why do different people like different music? Why does one of my children like vaporwave while the other one likes Yann Tiersen? How is it that some artists become immensely popular while other similarly talented ones remain in relative obscurity?
Why, for example, aren’t The Little Unsaid as famous as Nick Cave or Radiohead? That question isn’t necessarily as flippant as it sounds. The band’s frontman, John Elliott, has a voice full of spine-tingling high notes and lovelorn eeriness that has been compared favourably (in these pages, in fact) to Thom Yorke. He also has a way with melodies and lyrics that could charm the birds off the trees, or freeze them off, depending on how he’s feeling.
But despite Elliott’s undoubted talents, The Little Unsaid still have the air of a well-kept secret about them. Ten years into the band’s existence, Elliott’s vision remains as lofty as ever, something that fans and critics are quick to recognise. But following The Little Unsaid sometimes feels like being a member of an exclusive club. The strange thing is, Elliott’s music has always been admirably inclusive: open to collaboration, inviting multiple interpretations and straddling various genre boundaries.
Although there was a solo album in between (2024’s My Role in the Show), Stay Fragile All Across This Cold Frontierfeels like a logical continuation of 2022’s Fable. Where that album toyed with improvisational songwriting procedures, this one positively embraces them. No songs were written in advance, there was little in the way of preparation, and Elliott used Eno-inspired prompts to get the best out of his band. Recording sessions took place on Lightship 95, a converted vintage lightvessel on the Thames, where regular members Alison D’Souza (strings), Mariya Brachkova(synths and backing vocals) and Tim Heymerdinger (drums) were joined in the studio by Sonny Johns on bass.
You can tell by the song titles alone that this is an album thematically invested in boundaries, borders, horizons and distances. To begin, perhaps counterintuitively, in the middle: there is a run of three songs at the album’s core that all evoke images of the sea, or of being somehow submerged. Shoreline Prayer combines fidgety percussion, swirling strings and confident piano with Elliott’s imagistic lyrics, with their dramatic conjuring of a ‘cold Atlantic death’. It’s one of those instantly powerful songs where hope and despair seem to coil around each other. Surfacing, on the other hand, is concerned with how we are overcome not by a watery grave but by a hot, carnal desire. It’s all pent energy and fuzzed, fraught vocals – an exercise in barely concealed potential – and is kind of funky, in a bone dry sort of way. Sea Wall State of Mind begins with a frazzled blues-rock riff, which is soon tempered by a billow of strings. It bears comparison to Richard and Linda Thompson’s rawest offerings, in terms of both mood and lyrical content, as Elliott summons up incendiary spirits and calls on elemental and biblical imagery.
These three songs are immediately preceded on the album by the title track, which shows Elliott at his most vulnerable. Soft piano and whispered vocal passages create a world that feels both intimate and expansive. His intention here, lyrically speaking, is to chronicle personal loss and growth and to fight against the hardening, deadening influences of contemporary life. But he does it with such expertise and grandeur that the song attains almost epic proportions, despite the minimal nature of the music. He has a way of drawing listeners in with universal truths presented in the most personal- and often poetic – of ways.
It’s a similar story on the darkly pretty opening track, Strangers. It begins with the lyric ‘One foot in the purple dirt/Of the wondrous universe’. Everything is contained in those words: the dirt and the wonder, the extremities of the human body and the wider extremities of the cosmos. What might at first seem like a generalisation, a hippy-ish appeal to the airy and the spiritual, is actually a taut, loaded and expertly crafted turn of phrase. That’s just one line; this album is full of such moments.
Many of these songs are snapshots of a moment in time, elevated from the mundane to the vivid by Elliott’s striking turn of phrase: Sundown, Coldharbour Lane is painted in the brightest colours of the night, while Shadows Are Where the Truth Gets Told – skittering along on uncomfortable drum beats – works in beguiling chiaroscuro. So Long, Skinny Blue, with its mournful, tinkling piano, sounds like a personal apocalypse but is nonetheless filled with a trepid kind of hope.
All these finely drawn emotional states are held in perfect balance by the band’s varied and often surprising musical choices. Song of the Unforeseen begins with neoclassical strings and becomes a meandering, stately meditation backed by tinkling keys and percussion that owes something to trip-hop. Here Elliott’s vocal delivery resembles a more serious, more highly-strung Roy Harper (though Elliott’s accent – which emerges more prominently in this song – is West Yorkshire, whereas Harper is from Lancashire). The final track, Small Windows, strips the music right back, focusing on Elliott’s singing and acoustic guitar, before hushed, wordless backing vocals take the song from sad folk to elated dream pop and back again. Here, as elsewhere on the album, Elliott’s control of mood is enviable.
Elliott has said that Stay Fragile All Across This Cold Frontier represents the crossing over into a new landscape, the beginning of a new chapter. Such themes can mean different things to different people, and that’s part of what makes this album so extraordinary: for such a personal statement – and a gut-wrenchingly honest one, at times – it has a broad appeal and is full of instantly recognisable facets of the human condition. It may not make The Little Unsaid as famous as Radiohead, but perhaps it should.
Stay Fragile All Across This Cold Frontier (September 26th, 2025) Carbon Moon Records
LP, CD & Digital formats. Distributed by Hudson Records.
The Little Unsaid Live Dates
Tickets: https://www.thelittleunsaid.com/live
1/10: THE SPRING, HAVANT
2/10: PHOENIX, EXETER
3/10 POUND ARTS, CORSHAM
4/10: RAILWAY INN, WINCHESTER
8/10: THE CUBE, BRISTOL
9/10: LECONFIELD HALL, PETWORTH
10/10: MOTH CLUB, LONDON
11/11: THE LANTERN THEATRE, SHEFFIELD