If ‘Dork Mode‘ announced ELI as an artist of real emotional depth, ‘Tinfoil’ confirms that the range goes further than many might have expected. This is a different kind of song entirely: rawer, more politically charged, and more uncomfortable in all the right ways.

The power here is almost entirely in the writing. ELI opens by turning the lens on himself with a disarming honesty, “I’m just a privileged white kid with a lot of white guilt / spilling coffee on his white tee, watching the world tilt“, and it lands because it doesn’t flinch. This is confessional songwriting that refuses to make itself the hero of its own story, and that restraint takes real courage.

What follows is a song about the particular exhaustion of being alive and paying attention right now. Conspiracy, distrust, food that makes you sick, rent you can’t quite pay on time: the mundane and the systemic sitting side by side, because that’s what it actually feels like. “Everything’s conspiracy like it’s been all along / I don’t trust these world leaders any more than this song” is the kind of line that sounds throwaway until you realise it isn’t.

The vocal performance carries all of it. Gripping, dripping in emotion, and completely in service of the lyric, ELI knows when to push and when to pull back, and the result is a track that builds quietly to something genuinely moving. The closing refrain “I don’t trust anything but love” arrives with the weight of everything that came before it, and earns every second.

Full of heart. One of his best.