London's Sarah Meth Returns with luscious dream-pop cut 'Bromance is Dead'

Words by Beth Jones

I play Bromance Is Dead on the bus, I’m in the city, suspended in blue light. The track has the disorientating sense of pushing its listener both forward and around in circles, moving in tidal loops. Arpeggiated synths create internal reflections, lyrics fold in on themselves “I know I'm loving, had a real big love in” and irregular repetitions allow new lines to land sharply. It’s dizzy, and always in orbit. 

Photo by Milly Cope

Following on from last year’s NY ILY, which veered between ethereal hymn-like minimalism and lo-fi folk, Bromance is Dead feels like a move towards something darkly anthemic, a little more sinewed, though still slyly evasive. On the release it sits well against Sister You Said, originally part of her 2023 EP Steps and featured recently on Lena Dunham’s Too Much. Both songs are wry and chronically laidback, with one track speaking to a slow burning out, the other to something that never quite lights. Together they make a kind of dyad of disillusionment.

Sarah Meth calls Bromance Is Dead “an ode to the end of a transatlantic situation- the moment where the (American) dream dies.” You can hear the fracture, the emptiness of someone turning up hollow: you get under something / treat me like a dumb thing. It's the aftermath of an unspooling connection, a cut cord, and the song itself unwinds as though embarrassed by its own clarity, wanting to blur again. It feels her in full: dreamy, wary, cool to the touch. Vocals slipping between jazz inflection and elegy, something in the waters of King Krule, Victoria Legrand, Helena Deland. 

And the power is in the distance. You want the song to come closer, but it keeps circling, orbiting, almost withholding. That coyness, that detachment, is the seduction: the sense of an ending that refuses to come back down to earth.

Listen to Bromance Is Dead on Spotify

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