After The End started with a question I couldn’t shake: what does it feel like to exist in the silence after something is over? Not during, but after. That strange, suspended moment when the noise has stopped but you haven’t quite caught up yet.
The production came before the lyrics. I had a chord progression sitting in a project file for weeks, a slow, minor thing with a lot of space in it. It didn’t feel like a song yet, more like a mood. A lot of tracks start that way. The lyrics tend to come when the emotion behind the sound becomes clear enough to put into words.
The verse structure was intentional: kept sparse, almost conversational. I didn’t want anything that felt too polished or resolved. The subject matter is about sitting with uncertainty, so the arrangement needed to reflect that. There are gaps where another producer might have filled in a pad or a counter-melody. Those gaps felt right to leave.
The chorus, by contrast, opens up. There’s more reverb, the bass sits wider, and the vocal doubles drop in. It was a deliberate contrast: the idea that there’s something almost freeing in accepting an ending, even if it’s painful. The “after” is expansive, not empty.
Lyrically, the line I kept coming back to was the simplest one. I won’t pull it out here, because it’s one of those where the context of the full track matters. But writing it felt like finding the centre of the song. Everything else arranged itself around it.
The artwork came from a session where we experimented with long-exposure photography in fog. The figure in the image isn’t staged: it’s a real person caught mid-movement. I knew when I saw it that it matched the song. Something present but not quite there. Something between.
After The End is the track I’m most proud of from this period. It took the longest and pushed me furthest outside of where I was comfortable as a writer. That discomfort usually means something worthwhile.