To begin, Mahuna’s new single “Far-Off Summer’s Night” does not fill the room with sound so much as it hollows out a small, reverent space within it. This is a song that arrives like a fog from the fields of Monaghan, a gentle haunting born of a Belfast past and a Berlin present, carrying with it the DNA of quiet sorcerers like Nick Drake and the rain-slicked melancholy of The Blue Nile. It is atmosphere as narrative.

The song operates on a peculiar, dream-like logic. It’s less a structured story and more a single, indelible scene held up to the light. That lyric, the “creaking… sacred stare,” kept snagging in my mind. For a moment, it made me think of the faded varnish on the globes of my grandfather, the way continents once bled into oceans, their borders sacred and permanent only on paper. The song feels like that: a map to a place that no longer exists, a personal geography of loss where you are the only one left who knows the way.

What Mahuna captures so exquisitely here is the strange paralysis of perfect memory. To be a “shadow,” a “dreamer,” watching your past self walk beside someone lost to you, is a specific and quiet agony. The central refrain, “the hour is late,” lands not as a statement of time but as a final, gentle gavel strike. It is the sound of a door being softly but irrevocably closed. The warmth of that final “fireside wave” feels both like a comfort and the precise moment the warmth began to fade for good.

Is there any grief more acute than the one for a moment that was, by all accounts, perfect?