Release date October 31, 2025.
I’m in a public space with headphones on listening to The Spikes. For anyone who loves a bit of detail, I have escaped away from some Muppet who was annoying me and I’m calming down with a caramel hot chocolate (nice) and music. As for The Spikes, the spikes is singer/songwriter Iago Haussman, an American from Rome.
This is what the press release has to say:
NEW YORK, NY – Unlike most living things that lean toward the sun for growth, The Spikes’ latest collection of songs have been harvested in the dark. The growth comes from a poetic process—creating its own life source and a metamorphosis of interpretation. Their LP “First Light” is steeped in tension, instinct, and emotional residue. Across eight tracks, it moves with quiet force, drifting through fragments of memory, romantic collapse, and strange, half-lit beauty. At its heart is the focus track and music video, “Garden Song,” a ballad that captures the rare comfort found in someone else’s arms. This isn’t a record polished for perfection—it leans into the cracks, the atmosphere, and the spaces in between…The LP arrives on the heels of two singles: “Dancing (In the Palm of My Hand),” and “Sapling Tree.” Their videos, directed by acclaimed filmmaker Michael Haussman (Madonna, Kanye West, Justin Timberlake), further establish The Spikes’ stark visual world and poetic storytelling.
Iago says, “This is an album of ethereal beauty. It is cinematic. It is an emotional and personal journey. Musically, it is more stripped back and quieter than my previous material, but it is also a lot more complex. More layered and atmospheric.”
With that information to hand – my review!
“Sapling Tree” opens the album, melancholic, the sad things in life keep on while the melody plays and the tree keeps growing.The song is piano led, a song for the coming of winter while love remains. I liked those last piano notes that closed the song.
“Garden Song” has more of a gypsy charm, it is more gentle on the ear and has one of those melodies you sway to. The lyrics are about the old soul and the sense of getting older within and without, ruminative and sombre with that sense of love and attachment to those special people.It’s a love song in its own way!
“Set Me Free” has a much heavier beat and a more acidic vocal. It is a song with more of a club feel to it, more of a playing live in a cellar groove, darker and unpredictable.
“Jungle Boy” changes to an almost spoken delivery, a horror style instrumentalisation, some harmony backing vocals that are gothic sounds rather than words. A simple piano note of two mixes with the darkness. I don’t know about this one!
“By the Moors” has a punk attitude in a stripped back clouded instrument style, it contains an emotive connection between vocalist and the delivery and I liked the drum beat that moved into the chorus. A pounding drum that was effective.
“Dancing (In the Palm of My Hand)” opens with a violin, then gradually builds up a song about searching through a bag of magic tricks. Lyrically unusual, but switching some lighter touches to lift the melancholic feel. Music as art.
“Electric Cannibal” with its range of imagery is one of those unusual songs that you listen to and wonder exactly what is going on (stairways of human bone?). I liked the drum sound again, possibly tabla style this time, and it had a sort of jungle rhythm. A song about a cannibal…okay!
“My Fair Love” closes the album with a simple piano sound and that distinctive deep vocal. I think this is late night listening and I am making the error of hearing it in the morning! I honestly mean this, some music has an element of when you should hear it. This is music to unwind to late late at night.
Whispering cinematic melancholy straight into your bloodstream, The Spikes has brewed up eight tracks that drift between candlelit beauty and unsettling shadows, where pianos weep, drums pulse like restless hearts, and the lyrics dance somewhere between poetry and madness. It’s moody, atmospheric, and beautifully strange — a late-night companion for anyone who enjoys getting lost in the spaces between light and dark.
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Stream music by The Spikes here
By Stevie Ritson