B-Side Guys

The bones of “To Be Free” were built in a living room in Brighton, cables everywhere, Vlad Matveikov and Neil Cosgrove going back and forth until something spacey emerged. That origin matters because the song sounds exactly like that process: two people chasing a feeling through a room full of equipment until the feeling finally showed up.

Solbore’s second single from his forthcoming album runs in three acts without announcing them. Brighton drummer Ravi Martin opens the track with a beat-heavy instrumental stretch that establishes the groove before gradually releasing it. Then Bonniesongs, the Ireland-born multi-instrumentalist Bonnie Stewart, steps in with a vocal section that lands like a half-remembered dream and exits just as quickly. The final act returns to the ambient production Vlad and Cosgrove built together, now carrying the weight of what just passed through it.

The lyrical fragments that surface in Bonniesongs’ section do exactly what they need to: “caught in shapes that don’t fit me / worlds that come to be.” The imagery is deliberately unresolved, drifting between belonging and freedom without landing on either. Stewart’s vocal tone, familiar from her BBC 6 Music-supported solo records, treats the melody as something to move through rather than occupy. It’s gone before you’ve fully registered it, which is precisely the point.

What Cosgrove contributes is worth noting. An early Aphex Twin collaborator, he builds new synth structures from Vlad’s bass and guitar arrangements, giving the track a foundation that feels both constructed and organic. The ambition of that collaboration is audible. “To Be Free” doesn’t just describe weightlessness. It engineers it.