Charlie’s Hand Movements have spent two decades as a bedroom project born out of an Essex art school meeting back in 2005, and ‘Slowly’, taken from their fifth album Somethingism (out October 2nd), sounds like a band who’ve settled comfortably into their own strangeness rather than smoothing it out. The track opens with the verses doing the heavy lifting lyrically, words pushed right to the front of the mix while the production sits dense and layered underneath, fuzzy guitars doing most of the textural work with reverb creeping onto the vocals in places and a hi hat ticking away under a subtle drum beat. The vocal delivery itself finds a nice balance, loose enough to feel conversational but precise enough that nothing slips out of place, sitting neither buried in the mix nor pushed forward as a showpiece.

Structurally, the song builds toward its chorus and drops back down with each verse, and that chorus is where the track earns its keep: “heart rate slowly” stretches that final word out until it wobbles, and just before it lands there’s a “you won’t come by” where the “by” climbs and falls in a way that’s genuinely good fun to listen to. It’s a small moment, but it’s the one the whole song seems to be leaning toward.

Lyrically, things are harder to pin down. There’s a repeated line, something like “think I know what matters most,” that carries through into the fade out, and there’s a sense that the words are pulling gently against the sunny, funky surface of the music rather than sitting comfortably inside it, though what the song is actually about resists easy summary.

The strongest choice here is that mismatch between mood and meaning, production that sounds bright and eclectic doing something quieter and more uncertain underneath. What’s missing is a proper bridge, some clearer separation before the chorus arrives, because right now the drop into that hook does a lot of work without much of a runway. Still, this is a band worth following into the next record.