Give Up – The Possibility That Love Is Not Enough
From Brighton & Hove, UK
Released November 7, 2025
Post-Punk / Shoegaze / Indie Rock
A moody dive into love’s limits and sound’s shadows
With their 5-track release The Possibility That Love Is Not Enough, Brighton & Hove’s Give Up step into a sonic twilight where post-punk’s tension rubs against shoegaze haze — a world shaped by distant guitars, brooding bass, and vocals that hover between intimacy and disquiet. The EP suggests that love, even at its most intense, may not always offer salvation; sometimes it only reveals what else you need.
Composed of Ashwin Bhandari (lead vocals & guitar), Lucy Roth (bass & vocals), Jarred Perez (lead guitar & vocals) and Matt Johnson (drums), Give Up deliver an emotionally raw and texturally rich sound — one that honors the darker impulses of 80s and 90s underground rock while staying rooted in the DIY and contemporary UK indie-reshuffle.
Sound & atmosphere — tension in tremolo, beauty in blur
From the first notes, The Possibility That Love Is Not Enough envelops the listener in a slow swirl of sound:
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Guitars that shimmer, tremble, and sometimes clang — more about mood than melody.
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Bass lines that pulse with a kind of nervous urgency, grounding the airy guitars in bodily tension.
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Drums that push and pull: sometimes driving, sometimes suspended — evoking restlessness, hesitation, emotional fluctuation.
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Vocals, alternating between Ashwin’s lead and Lucy’s backing layers, that feel distant and near at once: whispered confessions, half-formed thoughts, emotional undercurrents rather than declarations.
The production embraces softness and space over polish: reverb tails linger, textures overlap, and nothing is over-defined. This lets emotions bleed out in the margins — anxiety, longing, doubt — giving the EP a fragile, dreamlike quality that sits comfortably between clarity and disorientation.
It’s shoegaze not as a wall of sound, but as a fog of feeling — you can’t see everything clearly, but you sense what’s there.
Themes — love’s ambiguity, emotional fractures, and fragile hope
Lyrically and emotionally, the EP explores what happens when affection isn’t enough. The title frames the whole project as a question rather than answer — a meditation on the insufficiency of connection alone to heal, to save, to satisfy.
Through images of distance, fading light, uncertain promises and internal turbulence, Give Up paint love as a space where hope and fear coexist. Their songs don’t offer easy catharsis; instead they linger in tension — between devotion and doubt, between need and emptiness.
It’s a portrait of vulnerability: of hearts thrumming not with certainty, but with quiet, aching longing and the knowledge that even the strongest feelings may not be enough.
Why this EP matters
In the current resurgence of shoegaze / post-punk hybrids, The Possibility That Love Is Not Enough feels like a refreshingly honest contribution. Give Up are not trying to evoke nostalgia — they bend their influences (from 80s post-punk gloom to 90s shoegaze introspection) through their own emotional lens. The result is personal, imperfect, and immersive.
They don’t rely on maximalist production or bombastic choruses; they trust texture, subtlety, and emotional honesty. That restraint gives the record weight — what’s unsaid often carries more power than what’s played.
Final thoughts
The Possibility That Love Is Not Enough doesn’t offer comfort. Instead, it offers space — space to feel, to question, to lean into uncertainty. It’s the kind of record that catches you off-guard: not with loudness, but with vulnerability; not with resolution, but with resonance.
Dark, delicate, and quietly heartbreaking — Give Up deliver a post-punk shoegaze meditation on love’s limits, on longing, and on what remains when everything you hoped for isn’t enough.
© Thusblog
