Silver Linings — Catching Flies (2019)
Some albums don’t enter your life so much as settle into it — gently, quietly, without insisting on their own importance. Catching Flies’ Silver Linings is one of those records. It doesn’t announce itself. It drifts in like late-afternoon light, soft and angled, and before you realise it, the album has become a part of your emotional weather.
What still surprises me about this record — even after years of returning to it — is how human it feels. Not in the traditional way: there’s no confessional vocal, no autobiographical lyric, no gesture towards the theatrical. Instead, its humanity lives in something subtler: the textures of the sound, the space between the elements, the restraint of someone who knows that emotion doesn’t need volume to be real.
Catching Flies makes electronic music that feels like breath — quiet, warm, carefully paced.
And Silver Linings may be the clearest example of that craft.
The opening movements of “Yŭ” set the tone instantly. There’s a softness, a flicker, a sense of thought forming — not in words, but in mood. The track doesn’t build the way electronic music often does; it circles, loops, and gently expands, much like a mind trying to settle itself at the end of a long day.
“New Gods” shares that same emotional geometry. Repetition isn’t used to hypnotise; it’s used to steady, to create a pulse that feels almost like slow breathing. It’s music that takes its time — and asks you to do the same.
On “Satisfied?”, the album becomes more introspective. It feels like an internal check-in, the kind of quiet dialogue you only have with yourself when the rest of the world has stopped demanding attention. It’s reflective, but never heavy. You get the sense that Catching Flies understands how to hold feeling without squeezing it.
And then there’s the title track, “Silver Linings” — the emotional core of the album. It’s the closest thing the record has to a thesis: a quiet resolve, a gentle insistence on finding softness even when the world has tried to harden you. There’s warmth in its low end, fragility in its upper textures, and something very close to hope resting in the spaces in between.
Even “The Haunt”, with its shadowed edges, feels like a necessary counterpoint — a reminder that melancholy isn’t the opposite of peace, but often its companion.
What makes this album so rare is its restraint. It refuses drama. It refuses spectacle. It refuses the pressure to escalate. Instead, it does something braver: it listens. It holds space. It invites you to inhabit a quieter emotional register — the one life rarely allows and almost never rewards.
Perhaps that’s why it feels human.
Because it mirrors the way we actually experience emotion:
- quietly
- internally
- in layers
- in the pauses between thoughts
- in the breath before the next step
Some albums are for nights out.
Some albums are for driving.
Silver Linings is for moments when you’re trying to find equilibrium again — the moments when you need sound to reflect you gently back to yourself.
It’s the kind of record you don’t talk over.
It’s the kind you talk after.
And in a world that pulls us outward with constant noise, this album is one of the few that pulls us inward — towards that softer human centre we lose track of too easily.
This is slow listening in its truest form.
This is space as care.
This is mood as meaning.
And maybe that’s the quiet genius of Catching Flies: the ability to make electronic music that feels like skin.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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