B-Side Guys

Defiance doesn’t always sound like defiance. Ben Groth, the Chicago-based musician who records as The Child of Eve, builds his debut single around a word so ordinary it barely registers as a statement: breathe. But the song earns the weight it puts on that word, slowly and without announcement.

The production context here matters. Groth assembled a genuinely international cast for his debut album Sozo, including Gareth Quinn Redmond, violinist for Glen Hansard and Ye Vagabonds, Sara Di Bella of Irish choral ensemble Anúna, and Caolán Austin, a Northern Ireland Music Prize-winning engineer and collaborator with Joshua Burnside. The result is folk that carries more air and space than the genre typically allows, something closer to Nick Drake’s stillness than to anything with a banjo and a porch.

The lyrics move through collective suffering in deliberately spare images: bodies bared, words beating at knees, thirst and blood. “We’re broken, my sister” lands as tenderness more than lament. The song isn’t cataloging grief so much as sitting inside it, which is a harder thing to do without either melodrama or detachment.

Where it opens up is in the turn toward the sea. “When our bodies wade into the Sea / when our ashes drift in unity” shifts the frame from endurance to something more elemental, dissolution as solidarity rather than loss. The repeated “we’ll breathe here again” stops functioning as reassurance fairly quickly and becomes something more like rhythm, like the actual physical act of breathing through something difficult until you’re through it. What’s quietly remarkable is that the song never tells you what you’re breathing through. It doesn’t need to.