Out 4 September.
Pre-save it here: hypeddit.com/fui3tq
The song opens light. Someone throws out a line, hoping to catch a whale of a time, and for the first thirty seconds it reads like an ordinary night out. Then the floor drops. The friends stay for the good time. Someone else is standing in the corner of the room, crying, on her own.
What the narrator does about that is the odd part. He doesn’t comfort her. He doesn’t move her on either, and the lyric makes a point of saying so: *I could’ve told you to leave if I had no remorse, but I let it all slide.* Mercy by omission. That’s the full extent of the kindness on offer, and the song knows it.
The second verse explains why. He recognises her, because he has stood where she is standing. *I was once like you, doing all that I could just to catch a glimpse of the life that I knew was there.* And then the line the whole thing is built on:
I only got one reason to really care about the things that you think of me, when I don’t even care for myself.
That’s the real subject. Not heartbreak, not a break-up. The hollow spot where self-regard is supposed to be, and what happens to your relationship with everybody else once it’s empty.
The chorus asks a question and then declines to answer it. *Is this the end of the world, or did we just get lost in No Man’s Land.* No Man’s Land is the ungoverned stretch between who you were and who you’re going to be. Nobody’s territory, no map, but survivable. Being lost and being finished are two different states, and most of the optimism in this song lives in that gap.
One more thing, for anyone who likes to find these: *She said I.* It appears twice, and both times it gets cut off. She starts the sentence and never finishes it. A thought that never completes is more or less the condition of the whole song.
How it was made
Everything you hear on the record is me. Bass guitar, electric guitar, drum kit, keyboards. Mid-tempo rock, guitars up front, no session players and no borrowed parts.
I also mixed and mastered this one myself, which is the part I was most nervous about. Handing a track to someone else at the mix stage means you get a second pair of ears and a second opinion about what the song is. Doing it yourself means the record sounds exactly like the thing in your head, including the bits that maybe should have been argued with. I’d rather live with that.
Hear the demo before you hear the record
There’s a free download of the demo version at julience.com/free-demo. It’s the rough one, recorded before any of the decisions were made about what the song would become.
Take it, play it, then play the finished version on 4 September and see what changed. Most of what I do happens between those two files, and almost nobody ever gets to hear both.
About the pre-save
Here is the honest version of why artists ask for this, because a lot of the language around it is nonsense.
When you pre-save a track, it drops into your Spotify or Apple Music library automatically the morning it comes out. You don’t have to remember the date or go looking for it. That’s the whole listener-facing benefit, and it’s a real one.
The reason it matters on my end is narrower than most people claim. Streaming platforms watch what a track does in its first day or two, and the signal they weight most heavily is saves, not plays. A play can be an accident. A save is somebody deciding they want it again. When a cluster of saves arrives on day one, the track becomes eligible for the algorithmic places where new listeners actually turn up: Release Radar for people who already follow me, and after that, possibly Discover Weekly and the autoplay queues.
Two caveats worth stating plainly. A pre-save doesn’t count as a stream, only as a save, so it doesn’t inflate any numbers. And none of this guarantees anything. It’s a nudge, not a lever. For a project with no ad budget and no playlist money, nudges are what there is.
If you want to help beyond pre-saving: play it through on release day, and add it to one of your own playlists. That combination does more than anything else available to you, and it costs nothing.
Pre-save No Man’s Land: hypeddit.com/fui3tq
Free demo download: Free Demo Download