Kerry Charles returns with a slow-burning meditation on aging, sorrow, and the strange beauty tucked within it all. His latest single, “It’ll Be Over Soon,” carries the weight of lived experience while gliding effortlessly on a groove that feels like silk. The song, a title track from his forthcoming LP, is a quietly devastating yet strangely soothing piece of music that merges emotional gravity with musical elegance. It’s the kind of track that sinks in slowly—understated, intimate, and strikingly human.
Where his 2023 debut I Think of You was tinged with the youthful longing and confusion of early adulthood, Charles’s new work moves inward. “It’ll Be Over Soon” finds him in reflective mode, wrestling not just with heartbreak or desire, but with time itself. Lyrically, he catalogues the cumulative wear and tear that builds up when you’re not looking—physically, emotionally, existentially. There’s a sadness here, but it’s not despairing. It’s patient. It understands that nothing lasts, and that this truth is both the poison and the antidote.
But while the subject matter leans heavy, the music itself is an easy seduction. The groove on “It’ll Be Over Soon” is impossibly smooth, echoing the timeless elegance of Sade with a distinct touch of Japanese city pop—a genre known for making melancholy shimmer like neon. Charles surrounds himself with a dream team of musicians, including Jake Sherman’s luminous keyboard work and longtime collaborators Max Cudworth, Dustin Kaufman, and Clay Sears. Their combined sound is warm and intimate, layered but never crowded, each note gently reinforcing the themes of fragility and fleetingness.
Charles’s voice is hushed and tender, the kind that leans in instead of reaching out. It feels personal, like a secret he’s only just learned to say out loud. The refrain—“it’ll be over soon”—hovers delicately between comfort and dread. Is it a whispered reminder that pain doesn’t last? Or a sobering truth about how nothing, even the good stuff, stays? That question lingers long after the track fades.
There’s a palpable honesty to what Kerry Charles is doing here. He’s not posturing or preaching; he’s processing. And in that process, he’s crafted something that feels both deeply personal and widely relatable. Aging, regret, codependence, consumerism—these aren’t novel themes, but through Charles’s lens, they’re made fresh again. The result is music that doesn’t just sound good—it feels like a conversation you didn’t know you needed.
“It’ll Be Over Soon” is more than a song; it’s a spell. One that eases you into the inevitability of change, loss, and renewal with a rhythm that sways rather than stomps. Charles isn’t just writing about getting older—he’s making it sound, for a moment, a little less terrifying.
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