Some comebacks roar. Others arrive like a quiet breath you didn’t realise you’d been holding. ‘Come Back (When You Feel Like)’, the first offering from Chris Bull’s new project Every Other Weekend, is firmly the latter: a gentle but gut-deep reawakening from an artist who has carried a decade’s worth of grief, silence, and hard-won clarity into a single, beautifully unguarded track.
Once the voice and pen behind Manchester’s much-loved indie outfit City Reign, Bull has always written with the sensibility of someone who feels deeply and sees clearly. But this time, something has shifted. The rawness remains, but the edges are softer. The urgency is replaced by something more intimate and inward-facing.
The song itself feels like a conversation with the part of you that stopped moving for a while. Clattering percussion and chiming guitar lines carry echoes of his earlier work, but there’s a new warmth in the mix. Perhaps the result of recording in his mother’s garage with gear inherited from his late father, perhaps the result of navigating a decade marked by loss, isolation, and rebuilding. Whatever the cause, the effect is striking as a familiar voice arriving in an entirely new emotional landscape.
What’s so affecting about ‘Come Back (When You Feel Like)’ is its unpretentious honesty. This is a small and steady reclaiming. The lyrics read like a letter to the self, conjuring the part that went quiet after bereavement, that drifted during heartbreak, that slowly resurfaced through half-sung voice notes recorded in lonely kitchens.
His voice carries a kind of fragile conviction, like someone stepping back into the world but acknowledging the distance travelled to get here. Beneath the indie-rock shimmer is a message that creativity, joy, and purpose simply wait. And when you’re ready, they’ll return without judgement.
As the lead-in to a long-gestating full-length expected next year, the single suggests a record shaped by lived experience. ‘All Present and Inept’ looks poised to be an album born from quiet rooms, introspective nights, and the slow rebuilding of a life.
If ‘Come Back (When You Feel Like)’ signals anything, it’s that Chris Bull has returned to himself. And in doing so, he’s crafted one of the most quietly moving indie reintroductions of the year.
