Exploring Loss: The Emotional Core of Mazmere’s Latest Release

There is a kind of music that gets made because the alternative, not making it, would be worse. Jake Sinetos has been building Mazmere from the Peak District for a few years now, threading post-punk edges and ambient drift into something that sits slightly outside genre, slightly outside comfort, and entirely inside some private internal weather. This new release, out on July 4^th, which would have been his cousin David’s birthday, asks to be handled carefully.

Four tracks. Three of them carry the weight of specific people who are no longer here, and the fourth transforms the first into something stranger and further away, as if grief itself had been handed to someone else to interpret.

‘David’ is the centrepiece, the song Sinetos has been working toward for years, pulling it apart, reassembling it, never quite trusting that it was finished. That kind of process leaves marks. The version that arrived here, produced by H.A. Eugene of Brooklyn glitch duo Business 80, has the texture of something that has been through fire more than once and came back changed each time.

Acoustic guitar from Amyas Varcoe and bass fill the space around it in a way that feels less like accompaniment and more like presence, people standing in a room. Ian Evans’s electric guitar adds something harder at the edges, a current of feeling that won’t quite stay smooth. The song doesn’t try to summarise a person or conclude grief. It sits inside it.

‘I Can’t Hear You’ comes from a similar place and makes no secret of it. It keeps changing shape, Sinetos says, and you can sense that in the music; it has the quality of something that hasn’t fully settled, a song still in conversation with itself. That’s not a flaw, it’s what keeps it alive. The title alone does a lot of work: “not I can’t reach you”, or “you’re not here anymore”, but the specific, almost mundane register of a bad phone connection, the ordinary moment where communication breaks down. Which is, in the end, exactly what death is.

The live recording of ‘Run’ is perhaps the hardest thing on the release, and the most quietly generous. Rob James, who played drums on it, died earlier this year. His name is in the liner notes and in the breathing of the track; the way he keeps time here is not the background of the song but its engine, its particular quality of aliveness. Including it was the right decision. Not as memorial, exactly, but as evidence. He was here. He played like this. Listen.

The Business 80 reimagining of ‘David’ that closes the release is not a remix in any conventional sense. It dismantles the song and rebuilds it into something dreamlike and disorienting, a version of the original that keeps only the emotional core while letting everything else dissolve and reform. It’s the right way to end a release about loss, the original still intact somewhere inside it, but transformed by distance and time into something you can only half-recognise.

Sinetos wrote that he hadn’t planned for these songs to sit together, but looking at them, they all seem to be reaching toward the same thing: people who aren’t here anymore, and the impossible, necessary work of making sense of what remains. That’s as honest a description of what grief does to a person as anything these songs contain. And these songs contain quite a lot. This one is for David and Rob. But it belongs to anyone who has had to keep going.