Claire Cronin turns folk horror into a lullaby on the song Before The End Of Time

Claire Cronin has released a song called Before The End Of Time, and it is built on an idea that sits slightly off from the rest of her work. Stereogum's Tom Breihan describes it as a lullaby about how she will miss the world once it ends, which is a gentler frame than the one her records usually operate in.

Cronin is a writer as much as a musician, and both halves of that pull in the same direction. Her work is generally organised around folk horror and spiritual dread, the register of things half-glimpsed and things that will not stay buried, and it shows up in her songwriting as much as in her prose.

The clearest statement of it is Blue Light Of The Screen, the book she published in 2020, which is about her obsession with horror movies. That fixation feeds back into the music rather than sitting beside it, which is why her songs tend to be described in the vocabulary of a genre rather than a scene.

What makes Before The End Of Time worth noting is the direction it turns. A lullaby about the end of the world is still a song about the end of the world, but the grief in it points outward, at the world being lost, rather than inward at whatever is coming for the narrator. That is a different piece of writing from a haunting, and it is a harder one to carry off.

No album or EP has been attached to the song, and no label or release date has been given, so for now this is a single standing on its own. The indie hub carries the rest of the week's releases, our release calendar tracks the records already dated, and another song about an ending arrived the same day in Josephine Illingworth's Who Burnt the Mountain, a lament for places lost to wildfire.