Eliza Hull leaves the heaviest feelings for the softest moments.

Hushed and utterly soul-stirring, “Better” is a gentle giant of a song, breathtakingly reserved and quietly devastating, its warped guitars, forlorn piano, and glistening textures creating a space where every hesitation carries weight. Hull sings with an intimacy that aches, holding herself back even as the music gracefully gathers around her. The tension is exquisite: you can sense the song wanting to break open, but Hull understands that restraint can carry its own force.

*Light comes, l**ight leaves*
When you’re laying here beside me
Messy thoughts, white sheets
Something doesn’t feel right in me
Cause we’ve been fighting all night

You say don’t worry
But how do we make it better?
How do we make it better?

“‘Better’ is about me searching for answers,” Hull tells Atwood Magazine. “I was at a point in my life where I felt exposed, like I was transitioning into a different person, and I was afraid I wasn’t bringing everyone along with me. I think we all go through strange times where things feel a bit off, either inside of ourselves or in our relationships. I was having one of those odd times where I didn’t really know what I wanted anymore, and I was trying so hard to make myself feel better and make other people feel better around me.”

That disquiet lives inside every inch of “Better.” Hull isn’t writing from the clean aftermath of a relationship, where all the lessons have already been learned; she is caught inside the harder middle, loving someone deeply while knowing that an unnamed distance has crept into the room. “You say don’t worry / But how do we make it better?” she asks, and the repetition carries its own kind of desperation. The question keeps returning because there is no neat answer waiting behind it.

The song itself went through a similarly instinctive process. Hull first wrote “Better” on piano at Ainslie Wills’ studio before finishing it with James McGuffie and later reshaping it with longtime collaborator Pip Norman, who co-produced the track alongside Hull. When it came time to record the vocals, the existing verses stopped working. Hull brought in a new verse she had written only a week earlier; Norman hit record, and the take stayed.

“We didn’t change it. I remember after recording it, I burst into tears. I can’t really define why it impacted me so much. I felt so torn by my own emotions, not sure if I should be living in this fantasy world or trying to mend my life,” Hull recalls.

The production keeps that uncertainty suspended in the air. Warped guitars and forlorn piano gather around Hull’s close, exposed vocal, each element adding pressure while leaving plenty of space for every hesitation to register. When the song finally swells, the chorus intensifies that unease, as though everything Hull has been holding inside has suddenly entered the room.

“Pip and I wanted the production to have a sense of restraint in the verses and then really open up in the chorus. I remember being very clear that I wanted the drums to feel huge when the chorus arrived: the drums represent my internal torn world in my mind.

Lyrically there is this desire to keep trying and to believe that things can change, while underneath that is the question of how long you can keep pretending everything is okay,” Hull shares.

Night comes
Night leaves
I’ve been holding onto tightly
Seaside hotel
Something doesn’t feel right in me
But be quiet, tender hook
Keep playing pretend
You say don’t worry
Don’t worry about it

You’d Think We’d Be Used To Change By Now - Eliza Hull — You’d Think We’d Be Used To Change By Now – Eliza Hull

This push and pull reaches far beyond one relationship.

“Better” arrives ahead of Hull’s forthcoming album You’d Think We’d Be Used To Change By Now, out December 4, a record born from a period of profound personal and creative transition. Hull co-produced the album with Norman, marking her first co-producer credit, and much of the record preserves demo vocals and instinctive performances, keeping their emotional edges intact. Across its 11 songs, Hull wrestles with change, identity, relationships, desire, and the unnerving realization that becoming someone new often begins before you understand who that person will be.

Hull embeds that larger reckoning in some of smallest choices across “Better.” The song opens with time moving almost indifferently around her: “Light comes / Light leaves,” an image she later mirrors with “Night comes / Night leaves.” Days keep passing, morning becomes evening and evening becomes morning, yet the unease remains exactly where she left it. White sheets, a seaside hotel, another night spent fighting – Hull fills the song with private, intimate spaces that should offer comfort, only to find herself carrying the same disquiet into each one. The scenery changes; the question doesn’t.

Most revealing is the way that question subtly changes shape.

Hull first asks, “How do we make it better?” before eventually arriving at “How do I make it better?” It’s a tiny shift with enormous implications, moving the burden from the relationship onto herself. That instinct to internalize responsibility runs straight through the song: she wants to repair what has shifted, but she is also questioning how much of that repair belongs to her in the first place. Even “Keep playing pretend” carries an uncomfortable recognition that preserving a relationship can sometimes mean performing stability while something underneath continues to move. “Better” captures that frightening space where love is still present, but the person living inside it is changing.

“That tension runs through a lot of my upcoming album, You’d Think We’d Be Used To Change By Now,” Hull says. “The record looks at change, relationships, desire, nostalgia and the strange experience of looking back at who you were while also realising, you’re already becoming someone different.”

“For me, ‘Better’ is about wanting to move towards something better, while acknowledging that sometimes you don’t know what better is going to look like yet.”

That uncertainty is exactly where “Better” draws its power. Hull leaves the heaviest emotions suspended inside the song’s softest spaces, asking us to sit with the discomfort instead of rushing toward resolution. Every piano note, drum hit, and breath carries the strain of a person trying to hold love together while also listening to the part of herself that knows something has shifted. “Better” aches because Hull refuses to resolve that contradiction for us. She simply lets it hang there, golden and bruised, until we have no choice but to carry some of its weight ourselves.