Fast-rising Irish artist-to-watch Dove Ellis lets tenderness spark into a bright, urgent, and beautifully unrestrained outpouring of raw feeling on “Love Is,” a radiant, achingly expressive reckoning with love itself – one that opens a compelling window into the vivid emotional intensity and intimate, expansive world of his upcoming debut album ‘Blizzard.’
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Stream: “Love Is” – Dove Ellis
Love has never sounded quite as electrifying, as cinematic, or as jarring as it does in Dove Ellis’ world.
What begins as a tender piano confession blooms into a feverish, bright, and jangling reverie, pulsing with urgency and ache. The Irish singer/songwriter twists and churns, letting his music spark in real time – shifting from hushed intimacy to something bold, brash, and beautifully unrestrained. “Love Is,” the latest look at his upcoming debut album Blizzard, captures Ellis at his most unguarded and impassioned, laying out love’s contradictions with breathtaking candor.
Released as part of the two-track single Love Is / Pale Song and arriving alongside the announcement of Blizzard – out December 5th via Black Butter / AMF Records – “Love Is” finds Ellis at his most direct and immediate, pairing raw, unfiltered lyricism with a propulsive, radiant indie folk/rock sound. It’s the latest powerful look at the fast-rising artist, who has already drawn early praise from outlets like Stereogum, The FADER, Paste, and Atwood, and is, as of this writing, fresh off his first-ever U.S. tour opening for critically acclaimed indie rock band Geese. Born in Galway and now based in Manchester, the 22-year-old singer/songwriter has quickly earned a reputation for the startling clarity, elasticity, and emotional volatility of his voice – a sound that’s drawn early comparisons to Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, and Thom Yorke. Paired with the striking “Pale Song,” its companion release, “Love Is” sees Ellis sharpening his lens while widening the scope of what his music can hold; he’s at his most unguarded and ambitious here, building on the clarity and promise he first revealed with September’s “To The Sandals.”
Self-produced and recorded between London and Liverpool, with mixing by Sophie Ellis and Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Dijon, Mk.gee, Bon Iver), “Love Is” offers a tantalizing glimpse into an album that promises to be as emotionally intense as it is sonically expansive. If Blizzard is, at its core, about stepping into adulthood’s treacherous weather – that quiet loss of innocence Ellis describes when looking out from the cliffs of Galway toward America — then “Love Is” sits near its emotional epicenter, capturing those first disorienting moments when idealism gives way to something sharper, riskier, and real.
The song itself is a study in emotional escalation. Soft piano and Ellis’ tender vocal set the scene with surreal, striking imagery – “Fools are running in the square / You leapt right off the balcony” – before he drops the first shard of truth: “Love is not the antidote to all your problems.” What starts off feeling fragile and introspective quickly swells into something far more volatile. Guitars jangle and flare, the rhythm section kicks up dust, and his delivery grows increasingly feverish, as if he is willing the song – and himself – into some kind of clarity.
Part of what makes that escalation land so powerfully is Ellis’ voice itself – elegant one moment and near-fractured the next, a live wire that sharpens, softens, and shudders through the mix with a volatility that feels both instinctive and deeply intentional.
Fools are running in the square
You leapt right off the balcony
Cold dead palms wrap my eyes so tight
Gave me no chance to kiss you goodbye
Love is not the antidote to all your problems
Love is not the antidote to all your problems
Lyrically, “Love Is” unfolds like an emotionally charged laundry list, each line offering another facet of the same overwhelming force.
Ellis alternates between declarations and negations, building a kind of call-and-response with himself. “Love is / The only matter you can call your own,” he sings, before turning to more intimate images like “The sweeping hair that is protecting your sleep tonight” and “The snow pooling around your shoes.” These tender snapshots are then undercut by clear-eyed refusals: “Love is not / Keeping it loose… Love is not / Mapped by quotations and it’s not what it seems.” Love is everything and not enough; sustaining and insufficient; miraculous and maddening, all at once.
(Love is)
The only matter you can call your own
(Love is)
The sweeping hair that is protecting your sleep tonight
(Love is)
The snow pooling around your shoes
(Love is)
A whispered smile and it’s got nothing to lose
(Love is not)
Keeping it loose
(Love is not)
What’s in your dreams
(Love is not)
Mapped by quotations
and it’s not what it seems
One of the most arresting moments comes when the song seems to cave in on itself. The energy drops, the arrangement thins, and Ellis returns, emboldened and unflinching, to repeat “Love is not the antidote to all your problems.” It feels less like a hook and more like a hard-won realization, spoken aloud so it cannot be taken back. From there, he launches into the final, breathless incantation:
(Love is)
A fatal chance
(Love is)
A mortal chance
(Love is)
Your last chance
(Love is)…
It is a breathtaking sequence – a dramatic, almost desperate litany that captures just how high the stakes of love can feel. Each repetition tightens the screws a little more, turning the phrase into both a warning and a dare.
What makes “Love Is” especially captivating is how off-book it feels.
Ellis doesn’t seem interested in tidy arcs or familiar structures; instead, he lets the song lurch, blaze, and unravel according to its own emotional logic. World-building and songcraft feel instinctive rather than prescribed. The track careens between intimacy and spectacle, restraint and abandon, like a mind trying to make sense of something too big to hold. It is tender and feverish, jangling and bright, bold and a little brash – and that volatility is precisely the point.
In that sense, “Love Is” feels like a defining piece of Blizzard’s world – a song that doesn’t just hint at the album’s emotional weather, but embodies the storm system itself: vivid, disorienting, intimate, and immense.
“Love Is” ultimately lands as both a reckoning and a release.
It refuses to romanticize love as a cure-all, yet it never denies its power, its beauty, or its danger. In under four minutes, Ellis manages to capture the giddy rush, the looming risk, and the strange, stubborn hope that keeps us leaping anyway. As a B-side, it is almost disarmingly strong; as a glimpse into Blizzard, it suggests an artist ready to twist the familiar language of love into something sharper, stranger, and endlessly compelling. Whether you love love or merely like it as a friend, “Love Is” will blow you away.
In a landscape overcrowded with cool detachment and emotional shorthand, Dove Ellis’ songwriting feels nothing short of refreshing – a fearless, full-bodied plunge into feeling that reminds you just how vivid and vulnerable indie folk can still be. If this is where he begins – already twisting emotional truth into something this vivid and alive – the road ahead feels nothing short of formidable. Ellis’ debut album may be called Blizzard, but the forecast is unmistakable: Something big is coming.
Dove Ellis is undeniably an artist to watch – and “Love Is” makes it impossible to ignore just how much he has to offer.
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© Xander Lewis
© Xander Lewis
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