In an effort to seclude ourselves from the impounding noise of the people and world around us, there are moments when we give our darker-minded impulses more power than they deserve. Brent de la Cruz, the rising artist from San Diego, CA channeled these same thoughts into his most recent single, “Alone,” releasing a visualizer along with the track. Both are an iteration of soul-searching questions he looks for answers to. “Alone” is Cruz’s debut song after a one-year hiatus that came following his previous album Finding Boo which he dropped at the end of 2021.

The song and the video for “Alone” offer a nuanced vignette of the artist’s innermost strifes, the visuals and the musical components of the track offer an emotional mirroring that portrays the kind of self-ruin the artist sings about. Hollowed harmonies and faded-out vocals play out as the song's exterior, but it's the desperate core of the lyrics that are the song's true message. He says “You can’t save me from this god-forsaken place, you aren’t afraid to ruin my day. Can’t you tell that I'm better off alone?” It's a helpless cry for support that ultimately gets shrugged off by his insistence on being alone.

Throughout the song, there's a noticeable metronomic distance between the uptempo beat and the instrumental that trails just slightly behind the rest of the song. Its melancholic resonance sounds far away yet still distantly familiar, perhaps a nod to the indecision that the artist grapples with, whether to stray from those he knows or find peace in the presence of others.

The accompanying video brings clarity to the unresolved track. Among retro-filtered visuals of friends laughing and passing landscapes of the city, the singer stands by himself in the darkened shadows of his house. Left to our own devices, we may force ourselves into believing we can do it alone, but sometimes that can bring us to a standstill rather than providing the solitude we desire.

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