By the time the guitars have fully taken over Collaborate, the album has already established that it is not particularly interested in behaving like a tidy collaboration. Simon Talbot brings songs that tend to begin with melody, atmosphere and a certain inwardness, while RG Williamson keeps finding ways to make those songs bigger, rougher and more guitar-driven. The interesting part is that neither instinct disappears once the other arrives. The record sounds less like a compromise between two musicians than a negotiation that never quite ends, with both of them leaving enough of themselves behind for the friction to remain audible.

Starting from a relatively modest musical idea and letting it accumulate turns out to be one of the album’s most effective habits. A bass figure can sit there long enough to become familiar, another instrument enters, then another, and suddenly the vocal is carrying a song that has doubled in size without announcing the moment when it happened. Low backing vocals repeatedly deepen the choruses, and the guitars are rarely content to function as background support for long.

Talbot’s role becomes more interesting the louder the album gets, precisely because he does not seem desperate to match the volume around him. His phrasing often stays comparatively controlled while the arrangement gets heavier, which keeps the songs from turning into a succession of vocal demonstrations. Iris is a good example of the restraint working in its favour: the melody stays exposed, the guitar lines have room to speak, and Talbot sounds less like a frontman trying to dominate a rock arrangement than a songwriter allowing the arrangement to orbit the song. In the middle of a record with this much guitar muscle, that simplicity has real value.

Williamson has a different relationship with restraint. His playing keeps looking for somewhere else to go, another layer, another figure, another opportunity to make the arrangement move. The guitar work on Ambition pushes that instinct furthest, and there are moments elsewhere when the music gets close to being overfilled simply because nobody seems particularly interested in stopping at the obvious amount of guitar. Occasionally that appetite gets in the way. Just as often, it gives the album its personality. A completely disciplined performance might have made the whole project cleaner; it also might have made it much less memorable.

That darkness is persuasive for a while because the record gives it several different surfaces. The heavier songs are not all built from the same arrangement, but many of them occupy a similar emotional temperature, with thick guitars and melodies that keep their distance from anything resembling easy resolution. After enough time in that register, however, the differences start getting harder to hold onto. Spiral and Confide deepen an atmosphere the album already knows well, and I began wanting the music to do something riskier than simply intensify it. One genuinely sparse passage, one strange rhythmic decision, one moment in which the instruments were forced to leave a little room behind them could have made the surrounding heaviness hit much harder.

Then Everything arrives with a lighter step and the album suddenly feels less sealed off from the outside world. Came Back to Say goes further, bringing a pop-punk/Americana energy and a streak of youthful rebellion that feels almost mischievous against the record’s prevailing mood. It is the kind of detour that can make the rest of the album look different in retrospect. The darkness stops seeming like the only available language and starts feeling like a choice. I would have welcomed another rupture of that kind, not because the brighter material is inherently better, but because the contrast gives the whole record more depth than another layer of guitar could.

The fact that Talbot and Williamson met through a Museboat Radio chat room is easy to treat as a nice piece of trivia, yet the music makes the origin story feel surprisingly relevant. Talbot came into the project with songs written during the winter of 2025/26, and the two then spent months shaping, recording and producing them before handling the mix and master together at Halo Studios in London. Nothing in the finished record suggests that one artist simply supplied material while the other decorated it. The arrangements still carry competing instincts. Melody pulls inward; guitar keeps pushing outward. The best passages are the ones where neither tendency completely wins.

That imperfect chemistry is also where the album’s main weakness sits. Some of the guitar-heavy sections could lose a layer without sacrificing any of their force, and a few of the darker passages would benefit from a sharper change in texture. The sequencing occasionally gives the impression of a record that knows its emotional lane so well that it becomes reluctant to leave it. I would have liked one song to take a genuinely strange route and stay there long enough to unsettle the rest of the album. Instead, Collaborate usually returns to the same gravitational centre, even when a detour briefly opens the windows.

Nothing about the ending tries to manufacture a grand emotional goodbye, either. Expendable keeps the album’s established momentum instead of suddenly slowing down into the inevitable closing ballad that records of this kind often seem tempted to provide. Part of me expected that softer exit, especially after so much accumulated guitar weight, but the more I lived with the album, the less necessary it felt. The record has been arguing for its entire running time between melody and pressure, restraint and excess, and it makes sense that it would rather stop while the argument is still audible than smooth everything into a final resolution.

What remains after several listens is not a collection of isolated favourite tracks so much as the peculiar shape of the partnership itself. Talbot keeps the material attached to melody and vocal character; Williamson keeps testing how far the arrangements can stretch before they become too much. Sometimes they overshoot. Sometimes that is exactly where the record becomes interesting. Collaborate would benefit from another colour, another kind of silence, another serious disruption of its darker habits, but its rough edges are tied to the reason the album feels worth returning to in the first place. The collaboration has not produced a perfectly blended identity. It has produced something better suited to these two musicians: a record in which you can still hear the separate instincts, the overlap, and the occasional argument between them.

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