heavy wild are a London band who have spent the last few years carving out their own corner of the city’s music scene with a scuzzy, gothic, sound that’s distinctly their own.

‘Lonely Dawn’ marks their first release on new label home Submarine Cat Records, joining a roster that includes Swim Deep and FEET, and it arrives as a statement of exactly who they are and where they’re going.

The track is fuzzy and lo-fi in all the right ways. The guitars are thick and distorted, the production rough around the edges in a way that feels entirely intentional, a world to inhabit rather than a sound to polish. And yet beneath all that grit, the emotion cuts through with complete clarity.

Frontman Wolfgang Harte has a voice that doesn’t compete with the noise around it but simply rises above it, carrying the weight of the lyric with a directness that makes everything land harder than you expect.

The writing goes to difficult places. Loneliness, helplessness, the creeping realisation that things have changed beyond your ability to reverse them: “you scream out at the top of your lungs / but the sky don’t care” is an opening line that sets the tone immediately, and the song never flinches from it. “Life don’t forgive you and life don’t forget / you carry this with you until the day you’re dead” is delivered not with self-pity but with a kind of unflinching resignation that makes it genuinely affecting.

It is heavy material, handled with a lightness of touch that only makes it hit harder. Lo-fi alt-rock at its most emotionally honest: scuzzy on the surface, raw to the bone underneath. One of the most affecting singles to come out of London this year.