Mike Stewart Theory’s new single, “It Reaches Us,” feels less like a piece of music and more like a strange meteorological event happening inside your head. You’re immediately dropped into a groove that has the smooth, shoulder-rolling confidence of 80s soul, but something is off in the atmosphere. The air is thick with a psychedelic haze, a sense of temporal displacement that is both unsettling and deeply hypnotic.
The architecture of this feeling is deliberate. Julio Figueroa’s drums are the anchor, the steady, human heartbeat in the void. But floating above it is Marcus Praed’s Moog synth, which doesn’t just play notes; it emits gravitational waves. It hums like a relic from an abandoned starship, creating that woozy, Indietronic shimmer that makes everything feel slightly unstuck from reality.
Lyrically, the track pulls off a brilliant, heartbreaking trick. It equates the ache of a past relationship to starlight—light from a source that may no longer exist, still traveling an impossible distance to land in your eyes. This isn’t nostalgia. This is physics. The idea, born from witnessing an eclipse, is baked into the song’s sound. Mike Stewart’s vocal performance has the quality of someone trying to describe the uncanny, pewter-colored light of a midday sun blotted out by the moon. It’s a quiet awe mixed with the creeping dread that the natural order has been suspended just for you.
The fallout of a love affair is arriving now, years late, a package delivered to the wrong address at the right time. The energy is real, its source long gone, but its effect is only just beginning.
How do you mourn something that, for you, hasn’t even finished dying yet?
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