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Feb 05, 2025 By Caleb Campbell

Arliston is the indie pop project of London-based musicians Jack Ratcliffe and George Hasbury. The pair are self-described ‘sad song specialists,’ crafting a blend of aching keys and silken synths in the vein of artists like The National and Bon Iver, all colored by Ratcliffe’s baritone vocals and Arliston’s atmospheric production. The pair have shared a series of new EPs over the past few years, beginning with 2022’s The Ground Might Disappear and Even In The Shade continuing with 2023’s How In Heaven.

Later this week, the band are set to share their full-length debut album, Disappointment Machine, out on February 7th. They teased the album last year with a handful of new singles, “Monks of Lindesfarne,” “Vertical,” “What Did I Think Would Happen,” and “Disappointment Machine,” and today they’re sharing an early listen to another of the album’s highlights, “Scratches,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Scratches” lands squarely within the band’s penchant for stark and confessional indie balladry, accompanying Ratcliffe’s melodies with sparse piano chords and subtle percussion. The dour atmosphere slowly blooms into bittersweet beauty, coloring the track in swirls of plaintive indie melodicism as dense layers of guitar and fractured soundcraft slowly sprawl outward. Lyrically, the track paints a portrait of the aftermath of an argument between a married couple, capturing feelings of both tremendous love and tremendous loss: “I don’t know where the time went / We fall over, we repent / I couldn’t ask more of you / I coudn’t ask more / Without you I would just unwind.”

Arliston says of the track, “This one of the oldest songs on the album and is the only one written outside of that two-week window in November 2023. It’s a simple narrative about a married couple, who have an argument. One is waiting in the kitchen, “scratching up the table with a knife” (more in an absent-minded way than malicious!), waiting for the other to come back and see the automatic garden light to click on. Having faith that they will come back, but they never do.”

Check out the song below. Disappointment Machine is out everywhere on February 7th.