Shifting Sands and Drifting Landscapes

Words by Angelika May

Photo by Jasmine Waldorf

A departure from The Shades’ first EP Grin & Bare It, Shifting Sands marks a noticeable shift in tone and texture. Where the earlier record leaned into a certain jauntiness and outward energy, this release brings a gentler, more restrained tenderness. Now operating as a quartet, the South London-based band; Sasha Adamczewski (vocals, guitar), Eli Rose J. Sanford (vocals), Johnny Payne (fiddle), and Jimmy Dawkins (double bass), the band find their sound necessarily, and perhaps deliberately paired back. 

That reduction in scale has exposed something more fragile at the heart of their songwriting and echoes a vulnerability through each track. Themes of burnout, emotional reckoning, and learning to make peace with imperfection subtly underpin the EP, giving its pastoral folk balladry a deeper gospel-like quality, perfect for fans of Nick Cave and Bishopskin and transports the listener into a world of rolling greenery to reap the harvest. 

Across its four tracks, Shifting Sands feels like one continuous unfolding world, where voices bleed into one another, strings rise and recede like tidewater, and every shift in texture suggests both movement and stasis. The opening track “Bleed” sets the tone with its intertwining vocals and earthy, sacred harmonies, balancing a two-hued tone in a way that feels archaic. That same sense runs through “Bridge to Another Land”, where fiddle lines drift like pieces of weathered driftwood and folkloric riffs evoke a place suspended between myth and migration capturing the emotional push of departure and translation. “Deep Blue Sea”, leans into a more submerged mood, and its delicate arrangement and siren-like vocal quality, conjures enclosed coastal spaces and the longing for horizons that are just out of reach. The closing track “For You”, reframes devotion as release, and love as something that must eventually be relinquished. With lyrics such as “perhaps my silence is all you deserve” and “I won’t cry anymore for you” reveals an act of self-preservation and concludes the EP as a self-reckoning as one confronts the challenges of letting go. 

What emerges is a record defined by contrast; intimacy and distance, stillness and motion, vulnerability and restraint. In its minimalism, Shifting Sands, finds an emotional depth that allows small details to carry the weight of entire narratives as it drifts between landscapes both real and imagined. 

Listen to the Shifting Sands here