Grief, in Martha Hill’s telling, isn’t a single blow but a slow accumulation of ordinary moments that suddenly carry weight they never used to… the socks still in the drawer, the number you can’t bring yourself to delete. That’s the register she works in on “Black Crow,” the second single from her forthcoming album Tether, written for Zoe, Hill’s childhood best friend, who died by suicide while the record was being made.

Musically, the song marks a deliberate step away from the scrappy, busker-honed alt-pop of her debut Football Heid. It would have been easy to oversell a song like this, reaching for the kind of big swelling chorus that tells you exactly when to feel something, but Hill lets the arrangement thin out instead, until there’s almost nothing left to hide behind. Just voice, space, and time stretched thin, as though the song itself is reluctant to move forward. The production stays close and unfussy, more felt than performed, letting the cracks in her voice do the work a bigger arrangement would smooth over.

There’s a particular stillness to the song, the kind that settles over a room after someone’s left it, and rather than chasing catharsis Hill lets that stillness sit and ache without pushing toward a tidy resolution. It sits with discomfort instead of resolving it, which feels truer to how grief actually behaves. For an artist who’s built her career on DIY instinct and northern candour, that patience feels like its own kind of statement.