You say you’ll spare my offer
Broken hands won’t be received
You’ll be left on your fragile knees
With all of this paying from what you keep
Still Ruins stroll into the room like they’ve been carrying this song around for years, rattling in their pockets with loose keys and overdue confessions until it finally burst out in a flash of startled grace. Our Penance is sophistipop dressed in bruised silk, gleaming at the edges but heavy where it counts. The band leans into romance with open palms.
The guitars glide with clean lines: no fuss, no hesitation, just a kind of cool, liquid poise. The vocals, meanwhile, sag under the weight of words left unsaid, stretching each phrase as if the singer is bargaining with time itself. There’s a rich glow that belongs to that strange zone between heartbreak and acceptance, when your pulse hasn’t caught up with your decision yet. It’s tender without sinking into mush, bold without stomping around. Their nostalgic, wistful sound channels the glory days of dream pop and college rock, drawing on the earnestness of Prefab Sprout and The Ocean Blue.
Lyrically, the song chews on regret like it’s trying to extract a memory from the bone. Two people stumble through the end of a relationship, each pretending they’re stronger than they are. Still Ruins tap into that peculiar ache of wanting to walk away, while praying the other person reaches out one last time. The refrain hits like someone standing in a doorway, unable to move forward or back.
Eli Wengrin’s video heightens the ache by smearing the band through smeared VHS haze, all glitchy lines and warped color bursts, like you’re watching a performance taped over some forgotten family gathering from 1989. The lo-fi texture works. It gives the track a ghostly patina; an accidental relic feel, as if the footage survived a basement flood or a pawn shop shuffle. You half expect to find this thing wedged between warped pop compilations and brittle aerobics tapes at a thrift store.
Watch below:
Our Penance isn’t flashy; it feels lived-in, bruised in the right places, and beautifully out of step with the present moment in the best possible way. Listen to Our Penance below and order the single here.
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