Tough Cookie find beauty in the bruised on aching alt-rock cut “Home Run”

Taken from their new EP Devotion, out now via Gravity Records, “Home Run” captures the skin-close stress of cutting off someone whose wreckage has gone too deep. The quartet deal in a crushing kind of honesty, holding affection and hurt in the same breath without letting either soften the force of the other. Tough Cookie comprises August Tse (vocals and lyrics), Jess Ayres (guitar), Gavin Sullivan (drums), and Dan Hvorostovsky (bass). Their history stretches back to Leeds, where Tse and Hvorostovsky first met a decade ago, and have been in various projects together ever since. After moving to London, they brought Ayres into the fold, already known to them from Leeds, and Sullivan, whose older brother had previously played in a band with Tse. “And here we are six years later,” they laugh. “Home Run” opens with reverberating strings and fuzzy electronic textures, before a sparkling guitar line carries the melody forward. “OK Computer and The Bends [by Radiohead] are very crucial to how we approach production and songwriting,” Tse says. “And more recently, there’s definitely been Grace by Jeff Buckley,” Hvorostovsky adds. Those reference points meet in the track’s balance of guitar-dr...