Our top track this week is Nothing Without You by Cloud Nothings, taken from their newest album ‘The Shadow I Remember’, released February 26th.

Indie punk-rock band Cloud Nothings kick their 2021 off with the release of their 7th studio album ‘The Shadow I Remember’, supported by its third single, the classic and nostalgic sounding Nothing Without You, our track of the week. Originally formed as a fake MySpace band by lead singer Dylan Baldi, Cloud Nothings were born when they were asked to perform at a gig and Baldi had to find real band members. Since then, they’ve released 7 albums to wide critical acclaim and a devoted fanbase. The album was written and recorded entirely during lockdown, and was produced by Steve Albini who they last worked with on their most respected and beloved album, 2012’s ‘Attack on Memory’.

Nothing Without You has all the energy you’d expect from a fun, fast-paced punk-rock track that really takes you back to the golden age of emo-style music and makes you want to dance around your room, viciously bopping your head. Baldi himself describes the song’s lyrical content as exploring “both the negative and positive aspects of dependency, whether it be on a person, a place, an object, or nothing at all.”, and this absolutely shines through on the track. While the subject of the song seems to have enriched the singers life (“you found the side of me / that I thought I couldn’t have known”), there’s also the darker, almost desperate side of things (“my heart can talk and beat for you / and you wouldn’t be anyone new”). The song’s title repeats over and over throughout the chorus and outro, highlighting the dependence of the speaker on the song’s subject - “there’s nothing without you”.

The song features backing vocals from Macie Stewart (Baldi couldn’t sing as high as the chorus he’d written required), a nice change in sound from the typically (self-described) insular nature of the band’s usual projects, and its release was supported by the creation of a psychedelic video game. Baldi says the game takes the concept of the song and “[filters] it through the ultimate needy creature, the Tamagotchi”.

We hope you all love this track as much as the music team do!