The XZs : Almost Hearts

The XZs find beauty in impermanence -- and in the connections that never quite finish forming.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that belongs only to travel -- the hotel room that smells like someone else's life, the stranger in a taxi who says something true before vanishing forever. The XZs have built "Almost Hearts" entirely inside that feeling, and it's one of the more quietly devastating pieces of dream pop to surface in recent memory.

From its opening image -- jet lag ghosts in a quiet room -- the song places you somewhere between waking and sleeping, between arriving and already gone.  The band's wash of reverb-drenched guitars does what the best shoegaze always does: it makes the air feel thick with things unsaid.

┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅

"No need for forever / no promise to keep / 

just a moment suspended / like a half-remembered dream."

┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅

The chorus earns every ounce of its weariness. The XZs aren't writing about heartbreak in the conventional sense -- there's no betrayal, no dramatic rupture.  What they've captured is far more elusive: the ache of a connection that was real, mattered, and was always going to end.  The bridge delivers the song's defining phrase -- where almost hearts will never meet -- and it's perfectly chosen.   Not broken hearts, not whole ones.  Hearts that overlapped briefly in borrowed time, then continued on their separate paths.

The outro brings it full circle: jet lag hearts in separate skies / carry on with borrowed lives.  Where the opening had ghosts in a room, the ending gives us hearts -- moving, airborne, apart.  Ghosts are stuck. Hearts, even transient ones, keep going.

"Almost Hearts" is best heard through headphones in transit. The XZs understand that some music isn't made for stages but for the quiet, in-between spaces where most of real life actually happens.  The song doesn't just describe that feeling -- it becomes it.

Spotify song preview:

Lyric Video: