John Drake’s ‘Ocean’ Washes Poetic Desolation in Waves of Soul-Stained Rock

With his debut solo single Ocean, the truly prodigal rock n roll conduit John Drake has torn away from The Dust Coda to expose a more vulnerable but no less arresting facet of his talent. The first single from his solo debut Separation Songs is a slow-burning catharsis, steeped in self-doubt and the inertia of ambition, as he captures the conflict between longing and paralysis with a voice that gnaws away at the walls of the soul. While Drake was never short of emotional artillery during his thirteen-year stint with The Dust Coda, Ocean is where he gives full licence to his inner poet. Resulting in a production steeped in haunting nostalgia, built on Bowie-style acoustic murmurs and thick, lumbering beats that drag you into a Radiohead-reminiscent realm where nothing is safe from introspection. There’s a quiet sense of disquiet that swells under the surface—never theatrically melancholic, always grounded in raw human ache. Drake’s vocal delivery alone makes the release a force to reckon with—teetering between the cavernous grit of Eddie Vedder and the fragile celestial range of Buckley. It’s not a sound engineered to pander, but one engineered to bruise with truth. Written in the aftermath of an identity-shedding […]

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