What Raynor gets right on “Brighter Than Before” is refusing to perform sadness as identity.
The loneliness sits there in plain view: someone waiting for a phone call they’re not certain will arrive, someone stuck repainting the same walls different shades of grey.
But the production treats emotional paralysis like a temporary weather system rather than permanent climate, all mid-tempo shimmer and 808 heartbeats wrapped in synth wash that sounds lifted straight from the late-’90s Britpop playbook before that playbook got photocopied into irrelevance.
Released January 9 after weeks of TikTok breadcrumbs building proper anticipation rather than manufactured hype, the track operates in that strange territory between confession and withholding.
The pre-chorus catalogues everything going wrong (“More than able / More stable / Yet scared to say”) but refuses to actually say any of it directly, letting the production’s sustained euphoric lift do the emotional work the lyrics deliberately sidestep. That’s the trick here.
The sound suggests breakthrough whilst the narrative stays stuck asking the same question on loop: why you fronting?
Raynor Samupita produced this himself at Safelight Records, which explains the coherence.
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There’s no committee fingerprints smoothing edges or second-guessing the decision to let a single image (walls covered in writing that needs painting over) carry the entire emotional architecture.
The “writing off these walls” becomes less metaphor than straightforward documentation of someone physically incapable of leaving their own thoughts behind, trapped in a space where even blank surfaces get covered in whatever won’t shut up inside their head.
The melodies cycle without ever actually resolving. The chorus arrives at “Brighter than before” like it’s answering something, but the track immediately loops back to verse two without letting that brightness settle or prove itself real.
That’s either brilliant or frustrating depending on what you need from pop music: resolution or just the promise of it dangled perpetually overhead like decent weather that might arrive next week.
What works about “Brighter Than Before” is how it sounds like optimism without requiring you to believe any of it yet.
Neon Signals tracks which songs, artists, and sounds are starting to move before they hit mainstream playlists. If you want a weekly breakdown of what’s rising early, you can subscribe here.