Nick Bellerose
There’s no subject more exhaustively mined in pop music than love—its arrival, its collapse, its endless post-mortems—and Nick Bellerose isn’t interested in reinventing the wheel. On The Only Way Is Through, he leans into that most well-trodden terrain with quiet sincerity and a palette of slow-burning ballads that feel tailor-made for gray afternoons and muted introspection. It's the kind of record that assumes you’ve been here before, and that maybe you just need a soundtrack to sit with the ache.
Bellerose plays it safe thematically—these are songs about longing and loss that rarely reach beyond the expected emotional vocabulary. He doesn’t stretch for the psychological depth of, say, a Jungian exploration of projection and anima; instead, he offers a more surface-level meditation on heartbreak, delivered with conviction but not necessarily revelation. That said, there’s a certain kind of comfort in the familiarity. These are not songs designed to shock or surprise, but to quietly resonate.
The production is understated, the tempos unhurried. There’s a hazy uniformity to the album’s pacing that risks lulling the listener into a kind of emotional stasis, but a few tracks manage to rise above the fog. “That Night” is a standout, a slow unraveling of memory set against a fragile melodic backbone. “Every Time” and “Since I Laid My Eyes On You” likewise tap into a rawer vulnerability, balancing sentimentality with restraint.
Ultimately, The Only Way Is Through does what it sets out to do: it gives the broken-hearted a mirror. It's not reinventing anything, but not everything has to. Sometimes it’s enough to sit by the window and let it rain.