Slowly Slowly
- 10 hours ago
- 3 min read
There’s a point in ‘Sacrosaint’ where Slowly Slowly stop sounding merely pissed off and start sounding genuinely worried. It’s an important distinction. Anger is cheap; existential dread with a massive chorus is considerably harder to pull off. The Melbourne trio manage it.
Their first new track since 2025’s ARIA No.1 Forgiving Spree, ‘Sacrosaint’ finds Slowly Slowly taking everything they do well — big melodies, bruised introspection, emotional honesty — and dragging it somewhere considerably darker. It’s restless, tense and gloriously unpolished around the edges, like a song being held together by sheer force of will.
Frontman Ben Stewart sounds like he’s having an existential crisis in real time. His voice strains, cracks and climbs, deliberately refusing the safety of a clean, comfortable performance. There’s a sense that the whole thing could fall apart at any second, which is precisely why it works. The further ‘Sacrosaint’ goes, the more desperate it becomes, finally arriving at its blunt-force conclusion: “we’re running out of time.”
Cheery stuff, then. But Slowly Slowly have always understood that misery is considerably more effective when you can sing along to it. The song’s target is bigger this time. Stewart moves away from the purely personal and looks at the wider mess: the erosion of the things we assume will always be there, the foundations we stop maintaining until suddenly they’re wobbling beneath us. The idea of billions of lonely people competing for something that increasingly feels finite gives ‘Sacrosaint’ its bleak centre, but the band never disappear up their own lyrical backside.
Instead, they turn the anxiety into a fucking good rock song. That’s the trick. However grim the subject matter gets, Slowly Slowly remain obsessed with melody. The track keeps reaching for something you can grab onto, building tension until the inevitable release feels less like a conventional climax and more like somebody finally losing their shit.
It also feels like a logical next move for a band who have spent the past decade refusing to sit still. Five albums into their career, with Race Car Blues and Daisy Chain both cracking the ARIA Top 10 before Forgiving Spree went all the way to No.1, Slowly Slowly have already established themselves as one of Australia’s more interesting propositions. ‘Sacrosaint’ suggests they’re less interested in consolidating that position than fucking with it.
There’s a pleasing lack of caution here. The production allows the song to breathe before steadily tightening the screws, while Stewart’s performance provides the emotional chaos at its centre. It’s not subtle, and it isn’t supposed to be. This is a band taking the temperature of the world and discovering that somebody has left the thermometer in the microwave.
Come December, they’ll be taking this new material to Good Things Festival alongside Limp Bizkit, Spiritbox, Simple Plan, Neck Deep and a sizeable chunk of the Australian alternative-rock establishment. ‘Sacrosaint’ already sounds built for that environment: huge enough for the festival field, damaged enough to make sense when the sun goes down.
Slowly Slowly have spent ten years turning personal pain into songs that other people can recognise themselves in. With ‘Sacrosaint’, they’ve widened the lens and discovered there’s plenty of pain to go around. Bleak? Absolutely. Melodic? Fucking hell, yes.Worth turning up loud? Obviously. Slowly Slowly are back, and this time they’re looking at the wreckage rather than looking away.
Check them out here: Slowly Slowly
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