B-Side Guys

Alex Runo spent almost twenty years making other people sound good, singing backup, playing bass and guitar behind Shirley Clamp and Uno Svenningsson, writing hits for Super Junior and TVXQ under someone else’s name on the marquee. “Icarus,” his return as a solo artist, opens with a very different kind of exposure: crippled by failure, unable to be his own savior, suddenly flying too close to the sun. After two decades staying safely in other people’s shadows, Runo picked the one myth built entirely around what happens when you finally leave the ground.

The song doesn’t stop at Icarus. A later verse pulls in the walls of Jericho collapsing alongside the melted wings, two separate ruin myths layered on top of each other, one about personal overreach and one about a city judged and leveled from outside. Whatever brings the fall, the song refuses to treat it as defeat. “Like Icarus I’m falling down, but I don’t leave without my crown,” the hook repeats, over and over, until falling and keeping the crown start to sound like the same event.

That refusal plays out musically too. The song shifts time signatures and dynamics across its runtime, tracking ambition, anger, and resilience as separate movements, the arrangement built in sections the way a blues anthem often is. One line late in the song turns the myth outward, demanding to know why someone would answer honesty with violence: whatever knocked Runo down wasn’t only his own overreach.

Runo has said he’s not comfortable playing it safe, and after twenty years building other people’s careers, “Icarus” reads like proof. A Mini Album is coming later this year. For now, the crown stays on, rubble and all.