Danny McGuire’s ‘Friends ‘Til the End’, out since 21st August, is a properly indie record in the classic sense, guitars and vocals sitting right at the front of the mix with only a subtle drum beat holding things together underneath, and the whole thing has a melancholic, chilled-out quality that never asks too much of you.

McGuire built it at home before taking it to producer Brett Shaw at 123 Studios in Peckham, and Shaw’s touch seems to come through mostly in how the vocals sit, close and atmospheric at once, which is a harder trick to pull off than it sounds.

The song follows June’s ‘Won’t Let Nobody Hurt You’ and takes a patient approach to structure, staying at roughly the same energy throughout rather than building toward an obvious peak. The chorus arrives without much of a shift in the music itself, so it’s really the lyrics turning a bit punchier that signals you’ve reached it, and that restraint means you end up paying more attention to what McGuire’s actually singing than you might on a song that leans harder into its hooks.

The best moment comes right before the end, where everything drops out entirely and a single guitar line rebuilds the song from nothing, straight back into that final chorus, and it’s genuinely the point where the track feels most alive.

Elsewhere, the chorus keeps things understated rather than going for a big lift, and there’s an argument that one more gear somewhere in there would have made that final rebuild hit even harder. But it’s a small ask of a song that’s clearly more interested in mood than spectacle, and on this evidence, McGuire’s the kind of artist worth following into whatever he does next.