In just ten minutes, Dress & Tie have managed to capture everything that love is. In its more dramatic moments, it’s the backstreets of Paris, amoristic accordions pulled together by a crescent moon. In domesticity, it’s home video tapes, subtle ukuleles that reveal in their haze how lucky we are to know and be known by another.
The multi-instrumental production creates the perfect marriage of sounds, effortless and chic like the shifting of fabric around skipping ankles or like separate birdsongs that accidentally intertwine as if destined to harmonise. As for the vocals of Sanchez and Devi, which are already divine in isolation, they are utterly spellbinding in unison. They simply fit together like the finest silk thread through a fresh and polished needle. Timeless.
In an age where romantic despair seems more common than a happily ever after, it’s refreshing to hear a genuine love story soundtracked so completely without being burdened by obnoxious cliché or Casanova caricatures. There’s a purity beating at this project’s centre, so refined and so undeniable that it could only be compared to the movement of the heart itself. It all sounds so real, like it’s just outside your window.
Love Sung by… Dress & Tie presents the soul-blended symphonies of Stephen Sanchez and Devi, which is why opener ‘Me Without You’ makes ultimate sense. A track about the tragically tender realisation that your existence only makes sense in the context of another seems so befitting of a project whose mere creation is proof that some people simply belong together. The ache of desire hums throughout, inviting your fingertips to hold its pulse.
There’s strings and trumpets and the daintiest of melodies, pretty much everything you need to dance unabashedly under a streetlight, not to mention the way in which their voices flawlessly fleckerl around one another as if making a waltz of late-night whispers.
‘What Did I Do?’ belongs to a fire escape at dusk. Currently in love or not, this song will make you swear you know the feeling as intimately as the lines on your palm. Something in the flow of brass, the ballet of delicate questions and the darling draping of one voice over another transports you high into the stars, legs swinging aimlessly in the night air where you look around and wonder exactly how you got so lucky. “Did I make it there?”
Evangelical echoes guide this story to a close in ‘Always Been You.’ Beautifully exposed, this track relies on gentle finger picking, plucking at strings in a way that resembles an index tracing itself across a bare collarbone. The music swells and builds until it bursts with the uncontainable notion that it in fact has “always been you” – violins will shriek and scatter like pixies conversing over tea. You could walk down the aisle with the feeling it leaves.
In ten minutes, you could empty the dishwasher, remake the bed or sort out that one drawer you keep swearing you’ll get round to. Or, proven here so intricately, you could fall in love. Let it take you to Paris. To the moon and back.
Dress & Tie: Love Sung By… Dress & Tie – Released 14 November 2o25
& Tie – Me Without You (Official Lyric Video)
