If you ever wondered what it might sound like if a Dutch rock philosopher decided to stage an argument between his left brain and his right, you can stop wondering. Harry Kappen’s “The Longing” — the opening track and fourth single off his new album FOUR — is a three-and-a-half-minute rollercoaster where introspection gets a distortion pedal and self-analysis starts to sweat under stage lights.
Kappen isn’t some bedroom dreamer mumbling into a laptop. The guy’s been a rock guitarist up in Groningen for years, and you can tell — there’s real muscle behind the melody. The track opens all moody and cinematic, an acoustic guitar flickering like a candle, before the electric current kicks in and turns the whole thing into a sermon about the chaos inside your own skull. “Sometimes my brain’s on fire,” he confesses, and the band obliges by setting the sky ablaze.
The man’s influences read like a rock ’n’ roll pantheon — Lennon and McCartney, Bowie, Prince, Zeppelin, Alanis Morissette, even Knower (because why not throw in some jazz-funk lunacy?). And sure, you can hear little shards of all that in the song’s DNA. But what makes “The Longing” fascinating isn’t imitation; it’s the way Kappen builds something hybrid — half classic rock theater, half alt-rock therapy session. He uses dynamics like weapons, throwing quiet-loud punches until you’re dizzy. The verses whisper reason; the choruses shout feeling. It’s as if Pink Floyd and Alan Parsons built a time machine and dragged Thom Yorke to 1975.
There’s a guitar solo midway through that doesn’t just fill space — it argues back. You can practically hear Kappen’s fretboard channeling the part of his psyche that refuses to shut up. It’s lyrical, almost pleading, but with enough grit to scrape your soul clean. And then, just as quickly, the track pulls back into itself, that inward spiral of self-awareness that makes the song feel more alive than most modern rock-radio fare.
Lyrically, he’s not hiding behind metaphor or clever wordplay. He just lays it all out there — “Practicalities, analyses, rationality” — like he’s auditing his own emotions in real time. That lack of pretense makes “The Longing” oddly refreshing. It’s unfiltered adult rock — not the sanitized, Spotify-core stuff, but the kind that remembers how messy it feels to actually be human.
The production, too, walks that tightrope between clarity and chaos. It’s clean enough to catch every layer — the harmonies, the orchestral lift, the rhythmic shifts — but still rough-edged enough to feel alive. You can sense the sweat behind the structure. The lyric video, a surreal flight through clouds, drives the point home: this is music caught between heaven and gravity, yearning for both.
What makes Kappen compelling is that he doesn’t tie the knot at the end. “The Longing” never resolves — it just keeps circling, because that’s what longing does. It’s the sound of someone who’s learned that peace isn’t the opposite of conflict; it’s learning to live inside it. And that, my friends, is real rock ’n’ roll philosophy.
–Eddie Charles
