Lewis Capaldi - Survive - EP (2025) [Hi-Res]

Only the coldest hearts refused to be stirred by the sight of Lewis Capaldi walking onto Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage in late June 2025. It was on the same stage two years earlier that the singer-songwriter’s struggles with anxiety and Tourette syndrome were publicly exposed in a vulnerable performance. By then one of Britain’s biggest pop stars, as beloved for his playful self-awareness as his breakup ballads, Capaldi soon took the decision to step back from performing to work on his health.

Glastonbury 2025 marked his reintroduction to the limelight, and he performed a new song, “Survive”, as part of a surprise set. That song opens this EP, released four-and-a-half months later, and there’s unavoidable poignancy to a slow-burning pop-rock anthem that confesses fragility and hopelessness in its verses but roars with defiance and resilience in the chorus (“I swear to God I’ll survive/If it kills me to/I’m gonna get up and try/If it’s the last thing I do”). The three songs that follow—the folky “Something in the Heavens”, a skilfully restrained “Almost” and piano-ballad-cum-stadium-anthem “The Day That I Die”—underline that Capaldi is still a master of transmitting yearning in ways that feel both firmly personal and relatable. The struggle to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss remains one of his key lyrical currencies—but, given his journey to recording them, these songs also carry a sense of new and happy beginnings.