There’s no hand-holding here. We Have Ghosts don’t ease you into “You.Know.Want,” they throw you into the wreckage and dare you to crawl out. The Wrexham/Chester trio have returned with a track that claws at illusion, both sonically and thematically. It’s less a song than a confrontation.
“You.Know.Want” bristles with exposed nerves: angular riffs that don’t resolve, vocals that spit more than sing, and rhythms that twitch like something cornered. It sounds like an argument halfway through collapse, too far in to walk away, too tangled to fix. Post-punk tension and alt-rock abrasion form the spine, but it’s the delivery that stings: jagged, rhythmic spoken-word lines that feel scrawled in the margins of a breakdown.
Lyrically, it’s a reckoning, calling out self-deception and falsehoods in others with equal measure. The track doesn’t search for resolution; it revels in the mess, in the grit of truth unearthed too late. “Everything feels like performance,” the band explains, and they don’t mean it theatrically. It’s a song built on the ache of seeing clearly, perhaps for the first time.
The production, tracked by Lewis Brookes and mastered by Ben Pike, leans into discomfort. Nothing’s sanded down or overly stitched. The tones breathe, scrape, shout. It’s deliberately raw, a sonic mirror to the themes of disillusionment and fractured honesty; and yet, under the chaos, there’s purpose, an intentionality in every burst of noise and collapse of form.
With the addition of Juan Sanchez and Sam Edwards on drums and bass, respectively, We Have Ghosts sound meaner, tighter, and more defiant than ever. “You.Know.Want” isn’t trying to impress you, it’s daring you to feel something real.
If you’re looking for softness, look elsewhere. But if you’re ready to stare down the parts of yourself you’ve kept quiet? Press play, cause this is indeed hunting!
