*2025 stock* Like moonlight playing on an ocean tide, Burn Into Sleep’s first record shimmers in the darkness with a perilous beauty. The core duo of David McLean and poet Lauren Bolger having been working with each other in various contexts since 2014, sharing the stage in Bolger’s iconoclastic no-wave band Locean, in a sorely missed free jazz trio with percussionist Pascal Nichols, guesting with Polish avant-garde collective Shepherd of Cats and Dream Skills of NYC and were both handpicked to join Thurston Moore’s group during his residency at Islington Mill in 2018.

But the duo remains the pair’s most enduring collaboration, with McLean often accompanying Bolger’s readings on either blazing saxophone or on murky guitar, reacting in real time to her award-winning poetry. Long undocumented, the duo decided to finally record in late 2019, recruiting Manchester’s most in demand jazz drummer, Johnny Hunter, to capture 8 songs live and completely improvised. Album centre piece ‘Diseased Mind’ was adapted from a small vocal motif Lauren had written to accompany her poem. The first appearance of the song simmers with a tragic malice, McLean’s guitar ringing out like a doomed harpsichord and Hunter’s drums ploughing a funeral march, guiding Bolger’s bruised lamentations.

The trio extrapolate on the song’s melodic themes again in the album’s closing track, but played with the intention of destroying its very foundations, shards of distorted guitar crumble against stuttering, bombastic percussion as Bolger croons variations on the lyrics. ‘Figure of Eight’ and ‘Alert and High’ chart a similar terrain, both extended explorations in broken song writing that hold a collapsing beauty. ‘Kamikaze for Love’ is the albums most singular track. A redacted torch song boiled down to just drums and voice, Hunter and Bolger conjure a playfully dark paean to the jazz ballad with no other instrumentation needed.