One of the topics “Hopeless” deals with is Hollis being taken away from his father when he was a child. Like most Picturesque songs, it both tells a specific story and is also riddled with hidden meanings and secret references. The emphatic answer to that question is contained within every aspect of “Hopeless”. “We asked ourselves ‘How do we break out of just being a rock band, or a Warped Tour band?’ Because we don’t want to be seen as that. “Musically, I think every artist kind of hits the threshold for the scene that they came up in, or the particular demographic of their listeners,” the guitarist says. For while that record was a world away from Back To Beautiful, their 2017 debut full-length, this song is a galaxy away. And while the band’s shift away from their musical roots started with 2020’s second album, Do You Feel OK?, it truly is in full force here. Ironically, the song itself is an act of defiance, a rush of adrenaline that bursts through that feeling of futility, defeating the very thing at the heart of its subject matter. It’s a song, Williamson says, that’s about being and feeling stuck on numerous levels, both literal and metaphorical, all of which play into its lyrics and the urgent, breathless melody that propels it. So we locked ourselves in a room and wrote, and that’s what came out.” “We’re notoriously slow songwriters, but since we were locked inside, we decided to be productive. ““Hopeless” was written during the earlier days of the pandemic,” explains Williamson. It’s simultaneously both who Picturesque-vocalist Kyle Hollis, guitarists Zach Williamson and Dylan Forrester, and bassist Jordan McGreenway-are and were. What makes that all the more intriguing and interesting is that it’s also a very specific snapshot of the past. A true blast of pop magnificence, while it retains some of the post-hardcore influences and sounds from the band’s early days, it’s more a calculated step forward into the next phase of their career. But then it suddenly jumps across centuries into the present-or perhaps the near-future-and the song explodes into a swathe of beats, synths, guitars and distorted vocals.

It begins with what almost sounds like a medieval guitar-line backed with a fuzzy crackle like an old, overplayed piece of vinyl. It’s something Picturesque have captured perfectly with their brand new single “Hopeless”. For while there’s always a distance between the writing of a record and its release, the last few years have truly highlighted the reality of that. Time has become an increasingly abstract concept since the pandemic, not least for bands.

Picturesque speak softly lyrics