Matt DeAngelis has unveiled his new single “Helpless To The Fire” — a rock ballad accompanied by a video shot in the outskirts of Las Vegas and select locations across Arizona. For an artist who debuted in 2019 with the single “The Clock Knows All” and has since released the EP “World I’m Comin’ For You” along with a string of singles, this release extends a discography that moved well beyond debut-era experimentation long ago. DeAngelis‘s background includes collaborations with Liberty DeVitto and Richie Cannata of Billy Joel‘s band, and his sound has drawn comparisons to Elton John, Billy Joel, and David Bowie.

An eight-year-old picks up a pen and writes his first song out of sheer overflow — everything at once, with an open heart. The same person, fifteen-odd years later, releases a rock ballad about fear of the future, and the nature of the writing is already different. Overflow has given way to precision. That is exactly what happened with Matt DeAngelis on “Helpless To The Fire”: the single carries the sense that behind it lies a long search for the right form to hold a thought that had existed inside him for years.

The comparisons to Elton John and David Bowie that have followed DeAngelis since his earliest releases create a certain gravitational field. You listen to “Helpless To The Fire” and you understand where the roots grow from: a piano-driven texture with the sweep of a full arrangement, a vocal that assumes the role of the lead instrument. DeAngelis puts that arsenal to work on a specific task — he is talking about impermanence. About how the fear of what lies ahead can paralyze the present. It is a dangerous subject, and DeAngelis enters it through darkness and quiet candor — from the side where entry is most frightening of all.

The video, shot in the desert around Las Vegas and in Arizona, deserves its own conversation. Fire in the footage serves as the central antagonist, a composite image of everything that burns and frightens inside us. The desert landscapes work in service of the lyrics with cinematic precision: the open space mirrors the very inner emptiness DeAngelis sings about.

And here a detail emerges that adds another layer to the track: DeAngelis is an active storm chaser, someone who in real life pursues hurricanes. On record, he speaks about a fear of fire. A person accustomed to standing face to face with the elements admits that the fire within frightens him more than the fire without. There is real dramaturgy in that — and it comes from biography, which means it is difficult to fabricate.

“Helpless To The Fire” is a track in which vocal vulnerability and the scale of the production coexist within a single space, and the balance between them holds across the entire runtime. That is a rare quality for a rock ballad.

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