Photography by Jon Bergman

“This is the last song that I write while still in love with you,” Charlie Fink sings on “Blue Skies”, one of many tracks that narrates the end of love from his band’s The First Days of Spring, a concept album of sorts for the brokenhearted. Named after Noah Baumbach’s 2005 film The Squid and the Whale, this London quartet mixed Fink’s downtrodden voice, which recalls Will Oldham, with delicate plucks and pianos throughout their headlining set, exuding a rustic aura of Americana that belies their British background. Much like the band’s cinematic namesake transformed from a quiet melodrama to a modest epic, the album’s title track (streamed below) morphs spare guitars into a climactic swell of violins and distortion.

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