Memorial, the Brighton duo of Jack Watts and Oliver Spalding, have shared Rest (& be thankful), their second release for Ólafur Arnalds’ OPIA Community and a collaboration with Irish singer-songwriter Niamh Regan.
The song takes its name from a valley in Scotland that Watts visited after an intense stretch of writing, touring and ordinary life had run together into something the pair hadn’t fully reckoned with. The place, Rest and Be Thankful, felt to him like a closing chapter. The track itself arrived fast. In a session with Dan Rothman (London Grammar) and Seth Tackleberry (Holly Humberstone), Watts picked up a guitar in an unfamiliar tuning while Spalding moved to drums, and the foundation was there inside half an hour.
It plays like a blurred landscape seen from a car window: a steady, driving rhythm holds from the first bar to the last, while shifting vocals and layered harmonies build toward a release carried by Ben Bishop‘s guitar, atmospheric and chaotic at the close. Bishop also played on Latchkey from the duo’s 2022 debut, so the partnership runs back a few years. Regan’s voice was, by the band’s account, the only one they could hear on the song; the two acts had toured together, and she brings a life and presence that lifts the space around her.
“The song feels like it arrived gently but carried everything we had been ignoring,” Memorial said. “Only after finishing it did we understand its meaning. It became a reminder to trust your intuition, even when you feel uncertain.”
Regan is no stranger to these pages. Reviewing her 2024 album Come As You Are, KLOF called it “a brutally authentic work from a songwriter of the highest order.”
Rest (& be thankful) is out now via OPIA Community.
Stream/Save: https://opia.lnk.to/Restandbethankful