Blue Foundation return with ‘Harsh Love’, a haunting, intimate new track added to their latest album ‘Close to the Knife’. Featuring the ethereal vocals of Helena Gao, the song captures the ache of emotional dissonance, the quiet collapse between two people trying to love through damage.
Written during the same sessions that birthed ‘Close to the Knife’, ‘Harsh Love’ carries the same emotional weight: minimal yet lush, driven by ambient textures, fractured rhythms, and lyrical honesty. Helena Gao’s voice weaves through the track like a distant memory, fragile, questioning, unresolved.
“I guess I took it out on you,” the song begins, disarmed and direct. It’s a confession, not an apology. The kind of truth you whisper in the dark when everything else has already come undone.
In the words of Blue Foundation’s Tobias Wilner:
“It’s about the moment where you realize love has turned into something else, something harder, colder. But still, you’re reaching. You’re trying to hold on. Helena understood that from the inside.”
Helena Gao also appears on ‘Ecstasy in Space’ and ‘Voyage to the Stars’, but ‘Harsh Love’ stands apart in its stark emotional clarity. Sparse production, slow-burn synths, and whispered harmonies unfold like smoke. It’s not a song about closure. It’s a song about what happens when there isn’t any.
The track features atmospheric guitar textures by Xie Yugang of Wang Wen and Jonas Munk (Manual, Causa Sui), whose layered work expands the sonic space, stretching tension into something strangely beautiful. Together, their guitars give ‘Harsh Love’ its cinematic weight, floating just above the wreckage.
More songs will be added to ‘Close to the Knife’ in the coming months, each one an extension of the same world: fractured, beautiful, and brutally honest.
The band have also announced a new tour for later this year, including a London date at Oslo, Hackney on October 17th.
