The cover art for If i don’t make it, i love u, the third record from London band Still House Plants, is somewhat amorphous. A rorschach-like blob of warm yellows, oranges and browns, it gives the impression, somehow, of moving, flowing outwards. It’s apt, because the songs it contains don’t always feel like songs, but more like sonic pulses; a jagged riff, a repeated drum pattern, a mantra-like phrase sent out across the canvas of the record. Carefully, patiently they’re built upon, until something closer to a “song” takes place, slowly unspooling itself.

But these songs never stay completely still. They take surprising left turns, slipping into uncertain trapdoors. The three members of Still House Plants sometimes bump and trip over each other – not messily, but almost deliberately. In these moments If i don’t make it, i love u feels closer to jazz than rock in spirit. Vocals, guitar and drums are all their own main character, telling their own story; combining in an interlocking, somehow congruent chaos. 

When viewed in full, back cover and all, that pulse-like cover art takes a more obvious shape: a heart. If i don’t make it, i love u is, yes, challenging, but also deeply sensitive. There’s an obvious beauty to singer Jess Hickie-Kallenbach’s voice. It’s soulful in the most literal sense of the word, as if she’s conjuring her entire body and soul; excavating both its deepest recesses and most immediate human thoughts. “I just want my friends to get me / I just want to be seen right.” But this beauty also manifests more subtly in David Kennedy’s hypnotic, heartbeat-like drumming and Finlay Clark’s quivering guitar: a minor chord often teetering forebodingly at the end of a longing riff.

It’s not so much that Still House Plants walk a line between aching love and anxiousness, but that the sum of these feelings is their constant. If i don’t make it, i love u is strange and at times confusing, but also warm and comforting. Ultimately, and most importantly, it evades real description. The music itself is its description. Like all great music, isn’t that the point?