JULY MORNING | INTERVIEW + TRACK REVIEW

July Morning return with “Upper Hand,” a sprawling, storm-soaked single that captures both the weight of conflict and the relief of resolution. After years shaped by overseas moves, raising families, and life outside of music, the band has distilled those experiences into a track that feels equal parts turbulent and cathartic. With a sound stitched together from riffs, fragments, and long-form ideas, “Upper Hand” is proof that sometimes patience pays off in unexpected ways. We caught up with Owain, Jesse, and Gideon to talk about tension, time, and the beauty of songs that take their time to unfold.

TRACK REVIEW

“Upper Hand” opens with a surreal atmosphere, acoustic guitar, keys, and subtle textures weaving together in a way that recalls Pink Floyd’s sense of mystery and suspense. The vocals enter with an epic, almost cinematic weight, carrying a melody that feels both tense and perfectly placed. When the harmonies lift around the phrase “the upper hand,” it lands with power before slipping back into the intro’s calm mellowness.

A cruising guitar lick carries you into the second verse, pulling the emotion back into focus. While I usually lean toward tracks under the five-minute mark, this one proves the exception, by the time the three-minute mark hits, you’ll be glad you stayed the course. It’s a song that grows, shifts, and rewards patience, and in doing so, “Upper Hand” becomes more than a track, it’s a journey.

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‘Upper Hand’ explores duality and conflict, did any real-life tension or disagreement in the band actually fuel this song creatively?

Owain: Not for me personally. The initial musical ideas just came from exploring riffs and chord progressions based around a pedal tone. Everything came quite naturally from there.

Jesse: The exact opposite might even be true—the entire process of working this song out with the band itself felt like resolution of a lot of real-life tension happening elsewhere. It came together easily with us all, which is surprising, because that doesn’t always happen.

After time spent overseas, raising kids, and navigating personal matters, what’s a non-musical lesson that directly shaped your new sound or approach?

Owain: For the approach, I guess it would be to make the most of the time we've got. It's much harder to find time together now compared to before.

Gideon: Definitely taking proximity and time for granted. We now have to mindfully organise our time and process our creativity in a structured way to get the best out of ourselves.

Jesse: I agree with both of those takes, for sure. Those are challenges that aren’t going away and that we have to adapt to. I think I’d only add that we’re also better at backing ourselves and each other with our input and ideas than we used to be, maybe just because we don’t have time to waste and forced us to be wiser and more confident.

If each member had to describe ‘Upper Hand’ as a landscape or natural element, what would it be and why?

Gideon: I would describe it as the building weather before a storm, the storm itself, and the eerie quiet directly after, like when you're sitting on the porch watching the clouds move away.

Owain: I think of it similar to that—seeing a storm start to come in and experiencing the calm before, then being in the middle of it, and then in that moment when it passes. I also sometimes think of it as calm waves lapping up against a cliff face, building up and crashing, and then calming down again to ease their way back out to sea.

In a world where attention spans are shrinking, you dropped an epic-length track. What’s your case for the long song in 2025?

Jesse: I think there’s still an audience for a six-minute song—one of my favourite singles released this year almost tops 11 minutes. We like to challenge ourselves, and by extension challenge our audience, because we think to an extent that’s what art should do. For the rest of it, it’s just about presenting something the way that feels right when it is done, and ‘Upper Hand’ needed to be this long.

Owain: I've always liked a good long song. Something that can take you somewhere. Not that a short song doesn't, but when a long song hits just right, the payoff can be much more enjoyable. In terms of ‘Upper Hand’, it's just the length that feels right with the ideas and structure of the song.  It doesn't feel like a long song to me when listening to it or playing it.

You mentioned ‘Upper Hand’ was stitched together from lots of musical fragments, how do you know when a Frankenstein becomes a finished piece?

Owain: At first for 'Upper Hand', we never did. There were a few riffs in the original working of Upper Hand that were hard to cut out as they are great guitar riffs and they'd been there from very early on. In the end though it just didn't work having them in there. The song sounded less cohesive and lacked a clear overall structure with them. They just had to go so that the song could be finished. So once we cut the riffs that needed cutting, re-wrote the back half of the song and brought the original chorus back in its new form, it just felt whole. Ending it with the same chords from the start also gave it a nice sense of closure. It really did just feel finished though. When we cracked that structure in the 2nd half of the song we just knew.

If this new song is the sunrise after a long night, what moment or sound on it feels like the first light breaking through?

Owain: Because it's the first sound everyone will hear on it, I'd have to choose the very start of it, those initial notes from Gideon's bass playing. The idea behind that part was also to replicate a heartbeat, so it's symbolic of the first moment that we, as a band, come back to life.

Gideon: Yes, I'm biased, but for me it’s also the pulsating bass at either end of ‘Upper Hand’ that both sets the tone, and brings it back into focus.

What do you think the version of you from five years ago would say about the song you’ve just released now?

Owain: "About time you released some new music" or "Nice".

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