Dom Quincey confronts unresolved grief with soul-baring single “Through The Door”

London-born artist Dom Quincey shifts between aching vocals and swells of baroque-leaning instrumentation, turning grief into something both intimate and urgent in his latest track, “Through The Door”. “It was a weird song to write because it’s so vulnerable,” Quincey reflects. “I had the first couple of lines, but I didn’t really know where to go with it because it was too overwhelming. I wasn’t in a space to be writing songs.” It was while writing his previous single, “It’s Not the End...”, that Quincey found the clarity to return to the song, sitting with the unresolved grief of losing a close friend. “It kind of opened the door for me to be able to write about that loss.”

Before songwriting, Quincey’s sketchbooks were full of drawings and scattered words. “I drew a lot as a kid. I had lots of sketchbooks, and I would always write words along with the drawings. I didn’t know they were lyrics at the time, but that was the first kind of songwriting,” he recalls, hinting at the early interplay of image and word that now shapes his confessional style. His musical palette stretches from the runs of Mariah Carey and the indie charm of the Juno soundtrack to the raw vulnerability of Elliott Smith. “I guess the overarching inspiration is emotional honesty,” he adds.

For “Through The Door,” Quincey joined forces with production duo Evil Genius. “I went into [the production process] knowing it had to be sparse because the song is so raw,” he says. “I played them the song, which felt really scary because I hadn’t played it to anyone, and it’s a hard song to sing, which informed the production.” The resulting track is anchored by stripped-back production, with a soft arrangement that gradually unfolds, letting emotion seep through rather than announce itself.

His Jeff Buckley-esque words fall like handwritten diary pages but cut like broken glass, each lyric etched with crystalline honesty. The lines, “Please just walk through the door / I don’t want to live without you anymore”, leave a haunting sense of yearning. Beneath his soft vocals, a gentle yet raw guitar arrangement trembles like a held breath. “I knew I wanted to have the sort of tremolo guitar because I was watching a lot of Twin Peaks at the time, and that’s quite prominent in the theme music,” Quincey explains.

A restrained drum pattern slowly unravels, tightening the tension before it breaks in the bridge. “I wanted to have that sort of cathartic emotional moment towards the end because the song doesn’t really have a resolution. It is desperate in the sense of yearning for somebody to come back, even though you know they can’t.“ The instrumental outburst feels less like a climax than a surrender, where tension dissolves into something bruised as grief finally exhales.

On releasing the track, Quincey reflects on the vulnerability at its core: “It feels difficult to release something so vulnerable about something so sensitive. But on the other side, it feels quite cathartic to release that emotion. I just want people to be able to relate to it or hear their own feelings in it.”