Dearheart are difficult to file. The Seattle four-piece arrived in our inbox as a post-emo band, and that is one true thing you can say about them, but it stops being the whole story about thirty seconds into “Until All the Light in Us Is Given Up.” A moving As Cities Burn type of post-hardcore, emo and a plainer kind of rock all share the room here, and the longer you sit with it the less the tags matter.
What carries the record is the storytelling and the way the songs are built: tension that keeps gathering instead of resolving, a vocal that draws you in close and does much of the work of holding that tension, and a way with structure that keeps catching you off guard. A lot happens, with plenty of energy and plenty of emotion behind it. Fans of post-hardcore, emo and straight-up rock will all find a shade of it to hold on to.
The album is Dearheart’s second, the follow-up to their debut “Too Late; Doesn’t Matter,” and the two work best as halves of the same process. Where the first record sat in the immediate aftermath of loss, the wound still open and the sense of it still being made, “Until All the Light in Us Is Given Up” moves through the later stages of grief, the part where you finally accept that the love is not coming back. Its subject is the danger of a hope kept alive past its usefulness. The opening track, “Hope Is a Terrible Lover,” states the thesis outright: “if you hope for that which never comes and never let it go then hope will soon tear you apart.”
That structural restlessness has a source. Most Dearheart songs start as bare bones, just Steve on guitar and vocals, before drummer Brandon takes them apart and rebuilds them into something more complicated and syncopated, with bassist Greg and lead guitarist Craig adding their parts on top.
It is a writing chain that explains why the songs rarely sit where you expect. The debut worked differently. Those songs were written acoustically, before Dearheart existed as a band, and Steve kept a tight hold on them as they were translated for a full lineup, so most stayed close to their original acoustic shape. This time the songs were written electric, with the band in mind from the start, and the result was far more of a group effort in how everything finally took shape.
The record opens by laying its trap. “Hope Is a Terrible Lover” walks story-like through the build-up of love and its loss, ending on the worst advice anyone in that position can hear, that you should hold on because “you never know.”
It moves from open, spacious possibility into pent-up energy as hope curdles into anxiety, then hands straight off to “Maybe You Should Pray About It,” the album’s first single. That track names what the opener set up: the hope Steve has been trying to keep alive has instead “been dragging me through hell.” It takes aim at the standard thing people say to someone who is struggling, to pray about it, and asks what you are meant to do with prayers that go unanswered, or with what looks like an answer and turns out to be a mirage.
Grief slides into bargaining, then anger, and on “What’s Left Unsaid” that anger turns from God towards friends. Dearheart catch something uncomfortable here: how compassion wears thin when grief outstays its welcome, how “keep your head up” can carry an unspoken “we don’t want to see that,” how “pick yourself up” can be less encouragement than a request to stop dragging everyone down. The people who were supposed to be support stop being it.
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The album’s heaviest turn is also its most personal. “Glitter (In Waves)” is about the death of Steve’s sister, who drowned, and it runs through every stage of grief at once: the effort to understand the loss, the regret over the moments of connection he did not take when he had the chance, the helplessness of watching a life slip away, and the fury at a God who would allow it. As the song moves from grief for the person lost, “can you hear me?”, to anger at an absent God, “can’t you hear me?”, the music turns heavier to match, carried by a death metal blast beat from the drums.
Right after that comes a cooling-off. “Make Believe” is a lofi emo slow drag, built on the Japanese lofi hip-hop that became a staple listen during the COVID era, and it sits in the album as a quiet disruption to the energy around it. It follows the depressive stretch after another relational loss and the ways a person tries to numb out. The song also carries the band’s pandemic history inside it. Dearheart were due to tour Japan in 2020 and to start recording this album around the same time, and COVID took both off the table. “Make Believe” was written later, and the band eventually made the Japan trip in 2024, debuting some of these songs there before going in to record soon after they got home.
The second half opens with “Pretty Lies,” the track Dearheart pushed as the album’s feature, and it is where hope finally dies. The thing that kills it is concrete: the other person has married. The song sits in the anger of realising you may have remembered the whole relationship through a flattering filter, and in the worse realisation underneath it, that watching them rebuild that history with someone else does not mean they are papering over the pain. It means they simply did not care as much as you did, and they have moved on.
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“Summer Days” steps back from all of that into nostalgia, a moment of fond remembering and the open question of whether the other person still thinks about you, alongside the older question of why it did not work in the first place.
“No News Is Good News” is what happens to that nostalgia next: it gets boxed up and pushed under the bed, out of sight but still within reach if anything ever changes. It is the denial stage, the refusal to accept that it is over, holding on to the dream because it is the last piece of the person left. “Antarctica” is the first real movement towards healing, the getting-away-to-find-yourself song, about leaving in order to come back, learning there is still something worth trusting in the world, the opening move of acceptance.
The record ends on “Hospitals,” which pulls back for a wide view of the despair and then offers a way out of it. The shift it describes is from wanting to protect hope at any cost to wanting to kill it just to stop it hurting. Out of that isolating depression comes the invitation to “let it all pour out,” which the song treats as a stand-in for therapy: actually feeling and working through the loss, something that can feel like drowning while it happens but leaves you grounded and able to hold a new kind of hope on the other side.
“Until All the Light in Us Is Given Up” came out on Friday, 22 May 2026 through a distribution deal with Adventure Cat Records. Dearheart rolled it out single by single across the year: “Maybe You Should Pray About It” on 2 January, “Summer Days” on 6 February, “What’s Left Unsaid” on 13 March, “No News Is Good News” on 17 April, and the full album on 22 May with “Pretty Lies” as the feature track. A Pacific Northwest tour follows, with a possible UK run in July.
There is a quiet irony in how the album was made. Most of these songs date back to around the time of “Too Late; Doesn’t Matter” but capture the later turns of the grief cycle, the part that arrives once the hope for the relationship has fully closed, so they never fit the immediacy of the debut. That gap changed the recording. The first album was tracked while the feelings were still fresh and unresolved. This one, after all its delays, was put to tape long after Steve had processed and moved past the emotional content of the songs.
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