I Want to Touch You

Where "Crank" overwhelms, this song seduces. The guitars still carry that signature Catherine Wheel shimmer — multiple layers stacked until the individual strings dissolve into a single luminous texture — but here they're arranged around space rather than filling it. Rob Dickinson's voice emerges clearly, intimate in a way that feels almost confessional, the delivery hovering between yearning and restraint. The song understands desire as something aching and unresolved rather than triumphant, and the production honors that ambiguity: things bloom and pull back, the chorus opens wider than the verses but never fully releases the tension it builds. There's a warmth in the low end, something almost oceanic about how the bass moves, grounding what might otherwise float away into pure atmosphere. The lyric circles the vulnerability of wanting contact — human, physical, emotional — without ever becoming sentimental about it. This is shoegaze at its most emotionally legible, the genre's characteristic gauze used not to obscure feeling but to soften it into something survivable. It belongs to the lineage of early Slowdive and Ride but finds its own register, more direct about longing than either. You'd put this on in a car at dusk, windows down slightly, when the evening has turned soft and you're thinking about someone you haven't called.