There’s a beautifully urgent twitch at the heart of Lemon’s new single, “Let It Out!”, the kind of coiled-spring energy that feels seconds away from either unravelling completely or launching you across the room. It’s the sound of a nervous breakdown finding its groove on the dance floor. This is the band’s self-styled “Nedchester”—a funky, soulful export that seems marinated in Mancunian swagger and then baked under a rogue Dutch sunbeam. The rhythm section is the engine room of this catharsis; Mark Bongers’ bassline has a persuasive, strutting logic while Paul Hesen’s drums seem to be tapping out a very funky Morse code for ‘get up, get out, right now.’
The track lives in a fascinating state of contradiction. The verses hum with the low-grade panic of modern life—that familiar sensation of a mental circuit board about to short out. “My head is gonna explode,” they confess, and for a second, you believe them. But then the chorus erupts, and it’s not an explosion of anxiety, but one of pure, defiant glee. The guitars from Ralf Hesen and Thomas Gense’s keyboards ignite into a shimmering call to action: just drop it all and go get some sun.
This isn’t optimism; it’s something more peculiar and maybe more useful. It’s a philosophy born from exhaustion. The song suggests that acknowledging the world might be a lost cause (“don’t mind the world it’ll soon be gone”) is the most liberating thought you can have. It reminds me, strangely, of those absurdly detailed Hieronymus Bosch paintings of hell, where amidst the chaos, you spot one little guy who seems to have decided to just ignore it all and have a nice sit-down. This is the soundtrack to that decision.
Lemon isn’t just telling you to have fun; they’re presenting it as a logical response to the absurd weight of existence. So, is a groovy bassline the best antidote to existential dread? Maybe not forever, but it’s certainly the most danceable one I’ve heard this week.
