REVIEW: Boy Grapes – ‘When I Close My Eyes’

Boy Grapes’ ‘When I Close My Eyes’ plays like a stream of consciousness splintered into twelve songs, each one unafraid to throw you off balance. Rather than chasing cohesion, the record thrives on disruption. One moment you’re lulled into a delicate hush, the next you’re throttled by noise, distortion, and momentum that borders on collapse.

Opener ‘Sand’ feels like an intimate whisper before the storm, pulling you close only to drop you headfirst into the fractured urgency of ‘Just Move’ or ‘Humpback’. The mood shifts constantly, but never without purpose, these sharp turns mirror the volatility of thought itself.

The emotional core peaks with ‘What I See’, where Boy Grapes lets fury and fragility coexist in the same breath, building into a cathartic wall of sound that refuses to blink. By the time the record drifts into the spare closing track ‘It Isn’t Me’, the raw quiet feels hard-earned, like an exhalation after enduring chaos.

Elsewhere, experiments like the metallic pulse of ‘Bobby’ and the sprawling expanse of ‘Better Time’ push the album’s reach further, showing an artist not interested in comfort zones but in testing every angle of his own restlessness. Themes of identity and struggle surface throughout, the kind you feel in your gut as it plays.

‘When I Close My Eyes’ is about inhabiting contradiction. And in its unpredictability, Boy Grapes has carved out something both abrasive and strangely consoling, a record that embraces disorder as a path to release.