The last few weeks have been a bit traumatic for my family. These are the moments none of us ever want to have to face, and though death is an inevitability for us all, they are not all equal and some just truly don’t make sense and seem more unfair than others. The grief is still raw, the kind that no one can ever really prepare you for, and whilst we’re all managing in our own ways, none of us are really coping either.

It’s been a bit of a blur, not least since I had travel and then was pretty unwell during The Thing, misery slipping from one condition to another, days losing coherence. We can’t seem to remember the conversation’s we’ve had, the people we’ve spoken to, decisions we’ve made, what time it is. There’s just a sense of fugue, of unfixed melancholia: in time it’ll fade, turn like everything else into another scar scored on the inside of the brain. For now of course, that feels some distance away.

I hate reading and quoting press releases because it feels as though I’m delivering someone else’s script, but it talks of Jeff’s exploration here of “memory, grief, transition and renewal”, the record as a “meditation on emotional transformation”. As such, I almost didn’t want to write about Melting Days at this point in time: at first it felt like too much of the album was too dynamic somehow for me right now, but after repeat listens I came to realise the facade. The carefully constructed frontages that move in apparent, if somewhat demure, joviality, are betrayed by slow and laboured undercurrents that hide a sadness not always readable by others.

Here instead was something closer to a mirror, one that I didn’t need to get to know from the other side. My personal favourite for example, “Apparition”, moves in what can only be described as stylistically idiosyncratic cyclic electronics that could have come from nowhere but the Lusine project. But underneath its light synthetics are injections of flattened percussion and humming minor chords that increasingly cling and drag the surfaces of its vortices, a depressive force in the very medium it exists within.

This is more subtle elsewhere: sophomore “Bird’s Eye” and its tinkling percussion arpeggiate delicately along. Propelled by similar subsurface emanations that rise reticently to the fore, they shy from perception in the final moments, left to die in the Sun once the distractions of life have moved on and left us to ourselves. Closer “Uncharted” takes this to a more complicated place as it intertwines these tilted cascades of glimmering chords against a backdrop of metronomic Techno insistences. It moves forward steadily, oscillations in its backfield forcing an advance, marching us from the fragmentary chaos of early woodwinds into the showering of sparks that we yearn to ignite a sense of hope in the future.

The lineage with Jeff’s possibly most ambient prior endeavour, Language Barrier, is not readily apparent, but peeks through perhaps in some of the more stripped back moments. “All Clear” shuffles and flares into life, delicate electronic lines bleeping and blinking in hospital life monitor reminiscences, gently bedded as usual by soft drones and glowing synths. Otherwise, there’s something like too much “fullness” to the sound and none of its predecessor’s cool loneliness: even in the the most sonically minimal moment of penultimate “These Walls”, the softly throbbing tones feel enveloping, despite (or maybe in spite of) the melancholia that pervades them.

This is important, this something-within-everything here that feels connected, by which I mean, not isolated. Despite the circumstances, despite the obvious pain and sadness that breaks the surface, there’s this feeling of closeness that provides some level of comfort. Shared warmth. Or maybe that’s a reading of it. Regardless, there’s certainly a real sense of underlying grief hidden here to various degrees below the fluctuating excitations of normal life.

Any year in which a new Lusine record appears cannot truly be a bad year, and despite everything going on I’m grateful that this new offering arrived with an odd sense of personal synchronicity. Soon, like here, that oil slick of darkness will slip below the surface and leave the wavelets to glint in the Sun again, but the sea remembers.

Melting Days releases on Ghostly on the 21st August 2026.