“Spring Forward” picks its subject carefully: that strange, slightly disorienting window when the clocks change but the weather hasn’t caught up yet. The world tells you it’s spring, your body clock disagrees, and the whole thing sits somewhere between relief and exhaustion. Ellis finds the feeling without overselling it, which is the hard part. The production keeps things light but not shallow, leaving room for the melody to do its work. Lead guitar from Phil of St. Divine adds a collaborative, lived-in quality to the track that makes it feel less like a solo project and more like a band catching something in the moment.

Ellis has a bio that reads like a highlight reel of New York creative hustle – Law & Order credits, Andy Kaufman Award appearances, a stint in a marshmallow factory – and “Spring Forward” is very much the work of someone who’s been around long enough to know how to shape an idea without overcomplicating it. “Remember Spring?” wraps up a project that apparently took years and multiple seasons to complete. Getting to the end of something like that is its own kind of accomplishment, and this track earns its spot as the opening statement.

Musically, there is a lot of warmth in this song, and most of it comes from the bass, which contrasts super well with the chimey quality of the guitar strumming. All of it is held together by the touching vocal delivery that keeps you engaged with the song’s emotional core throughout. The way the layers build up slowly is masterful; it’s the kind of arrangement you would expect from a songwriter with much more experience, and that shows just how much Jared has evolved as an artist between the last release and this upcoming one.

“Between Bricks” is the second single off Ins and follows Fullerman’s 2023 debut, Albatross, which earned him a solid foothold in the indie blogosphere. He formerly recorded as jrdfllrmn and has since consolidated everything under his full name – a small move that signals someone thinking about where this is going long-term. A third single, “Smoke (I Blame),” lands April 30, the day before the album drops. With Ins sequenced as carefully as it apparently is, “Between Bricks” probably lands right where it needs to.

Within the architecture of Watch Me Die Inside, every release is a Fragment — a discrete exposure of a psychological state suspended between function and collapse, identity and its loss, emptiness and resistance. Fragments do not stand alone. They accumulate. Multiple Fragments form an Autopsy: not a collection of songs, but the methodical dissection of a wound that has been left unexamined for too long. The audience is never positioned as passive listeners. They are Witnesses — called to observe a condition that is not softened, explained away, or resolved. Only made visible.

⇒ Check out our review here.

“Melancholy Nektar“ enters that universe at a specific and precise moment. It is the Fragment that documents the phase where collapse is no longer feared — but tasted. Where sorrow, long resisted, ceases to be suffered and begins to be ritualised. Consumed. Desired. It is a study in seductive decay: the quiet intoxication that arrives not as suffering, but as refuge — and the way that refuge, over time, begins to feel like the only honest place left to be.

The tension the Fragment holds is the tension between dissolution and control — the state in which the individual no longer reaches for escape but instead sinks willingly, deliberately, into a self-created atmosphere of beautiful ruin. Despair becomes something almost sacred here. The line between poison and comfort does not blur so much as disappear entirely. What remains is a kind of terrible clarity.

This is the world Watch Me Die Inside was built to document: the modern human in a state of internal collapse, rendered without softening, without resolution, and without apology. “Melancholy Nektar“ is its latest testament.

The story behind it is as extraordinary as the music itself. Frontman, lead vocalist, composer, and lyric writer Jason McKee first conceived the idea for Soliloquy back in 1997, when at just seventeen years old he had accumulated enough songs for an album and needed a new canvas — one expansive enough to match what he was reaching for. Inspired by his English Literature teacher Mrs. Clarke’s explanation of Shakespeare’s dramatic device, he adopted the name. A soliloquy: a character alone on stage, speaking truth directly from the interior of a life.

⇒ Check our thoughts on “Soliloquy” here.

But life intervened, as it tends to do. The project was shelved. Then, years later, a chance encounter at a Spiderbait gig at the Forum Theatre changed everything. A girl named Lisa asked to hear a song. McKee had nothing but rough voice notes to show her. The embarrassment was clarifying. He quit his university music degree and committed to recording the album properly. He met producer Simon Moro at RMIT, recognised immediately that he was the right person for the project, and the sessions were scheduled.

Then the global pandemic arrived. Melbourne locked down. Rather than polish and rehearse what already existed, McKee did something far more difficult. Sustained by coffee and cigarettes and minimal sleep, he went back through thirty years of his own life’s work and began again — writing deeper, wider, and more honestly than he ever had before. The process consumed him entirely. The album sent him to hospital for six weeks.

What emerged from all of that is Soliloquy.

A step back to the era when albums were experiences — when listeners poured a drink, put on headphones, and surrendered to a full journey — Soliloquy challenges every memory and emotion its listener carries. It moves across a vast emotional range, covering the full spectrum of what a human being can feel, and it does so with a cast of musicians whose combined credentials are remarkable.

Alongside Jason McKee, the album features Kit Riley on bass (Robbie Williams, Savage Garden, Ross Wilson), Peter Marin on drums (Jet, Ross Wilson), James Ryan on guitar (Men at Work, Ryan Wilson), Jessica McPherson-Riley on backing vocals, and Terry Hart on piano — with the European Budapest Orchestra appearing on six tracks, elevating the record to a scale that will floor even the most demanding listener.

Soliloquy is Reetoxa’s second album and the full realisation of a vision that has been carried, interrupted, and ultimately completed across three decades. It is produced and mastered by Simon Moro.

“Pour your favourite beverage, put on your best headphones, and let Jason McKee and Melbourne’s finest music crew take you on an epic journey.”

“The Choice” began with a journey up the Hudson River on a brilliant sunny day. Standing before the white-rock Palisades, framed by greenery and the blue water below, Oledude found himself thinking about the history of that river — its struggle, its near-ruin, and its remarkable recovery. He thought about Pete Seeger, who sailed the Clearwater sloop for decades campaigning to clean those waters, and who understood that environmental change begins with human minds being moved, one at a time. He thought about choices. The song followed.

What makes “The Choice” musically distinctive is its source material. Oledude took the haunting, lullaby-like melody of the medieval hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and transformed it into something urgent and contemporary — new lyrics, new meaning, a sermon built from a carol. Influenced by folk icon Pete Seeger and progressive rock giants including Jethro Tull, Rush, Kansas, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and YES, Oledude has long been a “big sound” composer who hears his songs through orchestras and guitars alike. The track was shaped in collaboration with Berkeley-trained guitarist Zachary Staples, engineered by Mark Dann and Kat Lewis, and brought to life by a chorus of ten family members and friends whose voices give the song its communal, congregational weight.

“Writing ‘The Choice’ was a bold experiment,” Oledude says. “I had written parodies before, but I had never attempted to expand the meaning of a well-known song. Doing this sort of cemented my commitment to using every means at my disposal to make music meaningful and powerful to people.”

The story behind “The Choice” cannot be separated from the story of the man who made it. Chris Owens — known to the world as Chris Oledude — is a Black, white-Jewish, and Puerto Rican-born New York artist whose entire life has been shaped by the intersection of music, politics, and moral urgency. He grew up in a household where classical, folk, pop, funk, and protest music all had a place, harmonising with his brothers — including actor Geoffrey Owens — under the influence of his mother, the late Ethel Werfel Owens, his first music teacher, and his father, the late Major R. Owens, a librarian turned elected official.

In the 1980s, he performed on the streets of New York City, in dance bands, and recorded Anyone’s Revolution (1984), a cassette album that voiced sharp frustration with the Reagan era and caught the attention of folk legend Pete Seeger himself — who encouraged Chris to keep writing music for peace and social justice and to collaborate with like-minded artists. He went on to join the People’s Music Network for Songs of Freedom and Struggle.

For the next three and a half decades, life pulled him more toward civic and political activism than music. It was grief that brought him back. The death of his father stirred him to perform again alongside his brothers. The death of his wife, Sandra Dixon, led to a deeper reckoning — a decision to reconnect with music in a wholly new way. In 2020, reborn as Chris Oledude, he re-emerged with a renewed mission: to fuse the “old school” genres he loves — pop, funk, R&B, folk — with the urgency of the present moment.

⇒ Have you missed our review for “The Choice”? Read here.

The results have been remarkable. His song-video tribute George Floyd: Say Their Names, directed by Alyssa Dann, earned over 150 film festival accolades worldwide. His blues jam Orange Blues 24, accompanied by a stop-motion video crafted from 2,000 photographs over the course of a year, has won numerous festival awards. His 2025 release No Crowns For Clowns brought a blistering political critique to the airwaves. And his debut album Preacher Man — Vol. 1 took listeners on a journey, as he puts it, “from disturbing troubles to eternal hope,” with tracks including Rainbow Soul, Turning Tables, and We Will Get Through This winning fans across the world.

“The Choice” is the next chapter. And given everything happening in the world right now, its timing could not be more deliberate.

“At a time when war and other conflicts dominate our thinking,” Oledude says, “we cannot forget that the health of our planet and its atmosphere is the most critical issue confronting our future as human beings.”

Musically, this is like if Charlie Puth decided to do a melancholic 2000s rock ballad à la Breaking Benjamin. It is more unique than that, but that’s the closest approximation in my mind. The vocal performance is the best part of the song for sure, quickly followed by the great lyricism. The production keeps things unhurried throughout. The arrangement gives the vocals room to breathe, and the lyricism lands because the track doesn’t try to rush through its own emotional logic. There’s a shifting quality to the tempo and texture that keeps it from feeling static, and the alt-rock and emo influences from that early-2000s era are clearly worn on its sleeve without “Melancholy Nektar” feeling like a throwback. The concept – sorrow as something ritualized, almost sacred – is heavy, but the music earns it rather than just asserting it.

Aleph has been releasing steadily, with multiple EPs and singles dropping in the past year. Watch Me Die Inside is clearly in an active phase, and “Melancholy Nektar” fits into a body of work that gets more focused with each Fragment. If you’re drawn to music that treats emotional suffering as something worth examining rather than something to fix, this is worth your time.

Musically, this song shifts more into musical theater vibes, with the dramatic organ and the style of arrangement for the backup vocals, as well as the lead vocals’ obvious preacher/showman quality. It’s a very rich sound that complements the epic scope of the song’s narrative.

Taking a well-known melody and reshaping it into something with an entirely different meaning is a risky move – it can feel gimmicky or forced. Here it doesn’t, because the original melody already carried a weight and solemnity that transfers naturally to environmental stakes. Oledude’s prog rock and folk influences sit comfortably alongside each other in a song that genuinely earns its ambition.

Built on a foundation of restraint, the song moves with careful intention. A steady rhythm holds everything in place while the bassline, subtle yet decisive, gives the track its grounding pulse. Around it, guitars stretch and dissolve in soft, luminous layers, brushing against shoegaze textures without losing clarity. The piano, introduced with precision, doesn’t simply decorate the arrangement; it anchors its emotional core, adding a warmth that lingers beneath every phrase.

What stands out most is the balance. There’s weight here, but it never feels heavy-handed. The arrangement breathes, allowing each element to arrive naturally, to exist without urgency. Even in its fuller moments, the track resists excess, choosing instead to remain composed, almost meditative.

The vocal delivery mirrors this sensibility. It’s intimate without being confessional, reflective without becoming distant. The lyrics circle around a fleeting image, something seen, half-understood, and deeply felt. Rather than explaining it, the song lets it remain open, suspended somewhere between memory and meaning.

That openness becomes its defining quality. The track doesn’t resolve; it resonates. It lingers in that liminal space where certainty isn’t required, where feeling itself is enough. There’s a quiet confidence in that choice, an understanding that not everything needs to be fully grasped to be fully experienced.

In many ways, it’s through “picking at grass” that Yasu Cub begin to articulate their artistic voice. They lean into subtlety, make room for silence, and reveal how intensity can unfold without ever needing to be loud; how the most affecting moments often arrive unannounced..