I’ll always wait for you
The promise that someone will wait forever has enjoyed an excellent reputation in love songs, considering how uncomfortable it can become outside them. Patience can deepen into devotion, but it can also give obsession an alibi, allowing someone to call an inability to let go proof of a superior kind of love. London trio Black Doldrums explore that uneasy territory on Waiting, a song whose tenderness comes with the unnerving suggestion that nobody has agreed on when the waiting should come to an end.
The third single from Repetition Compulsion, due November 13th, 2026, via Fuzz Club, carries a particular connection to the band’s previous album. Written around the same time as In Limerence, it extends that record’s preoccupation with longing and romantic fixation into a love song that sounds both consoling and quietly bereft. Its accompanying video takes those feelings out into the city, where a solitary attachment becomes an increasingly threatening pursuit.
A deep, humming bass and the heavy thud of drums establish the song’s measured pace, while a cool, jangling guitar melody moves between high, glassy notes and lower, mournful phrases. There is something of The Chameleons in the guitar’s arcing melodies, and of The Cure in the funereal weight beneath it. Sheets of icy synthesizer widen the space around the instruments, giving the opening a peculiar calm: everything sounds composed, even as the melody suggests that something has gone terribly wrong.
When Kevin Gibbard begins singing, the synthesizers settle into warmer mid-range tones, bringing a little bodily comfort to that cold room. His voice carries some of Andrew Eldritch’s solemn authority in a slightly higher register, with an exposed ache that also recalls Ian Curtis. Beneath him, the guitar takes on an increasingly Cure-like character, its clear notes ringing against the low end. Then the chorus rises into “I’ll always wait for you,” stretching the promise into a lament. The guitar’s answering jangle supplies the small, involuntary chill, the sort that travels up an arm before the mind has decided whether the feeling is pleasure or dread.
For all that unease, the song began in an ordinary moment of affection. Gibbard wrote the lyrics early one morning while waiting for Sophie Landers to wake up, with the themes of their second album still close at hand.
“When we were going through the finished mixes of the second album, Sophie noticed this recurring theme of limerence, which pushed ‘Waiting’ further in that direction. I liked the idea of writing about waiting for someone you love, that if you love someone enough, you’ll wait forever. I wrote all the lyrics in one go, early one morning, while I was literally waiting for Sophie to wake up. I just started jotting it down.”
Landers also supplied the idea behind one of the recording’s stranger details, asking for a sound that would suggest a spirit departing its body. Gibbard found his approximation through a Mellotron, voice synthesizers, and pitch bend:
“Sophie wanted something that sounded like a soul leaving someone’s body. So I played around with a Mellotron and voice synths with pitch bend to create something similar. It seemed to fit nicely because it has this really haunting sound.”
That imagined departure hangs over a song devoted to staying. The warmer synthesizers offer closeness, while the guitars and spectral vocal textures suggest distance, absence, and the possibility that a promise might outlast the person it was made to. There is considerable romance in Waiting, though very little reassurance that romance will make anyone happy.
The video’s darker premise took shape during a recent viewing of Taxi Driver. Landers recognized connections between the film and the band’s interest in limerence, particularly its treatment of loneliness, idealization, mental distress, and destructive fixation. Black Doldrums developed those observations into a story about an isolated, obsessive man following a woman through the city, with his sense of control destined for a nasty correction.
Gibbard and Landers occupy a nocturnal world of café booths, shuttered shopfronts, graffiti-covered brickwork, and stretches of nearly empty pavement. He sits alone with a cup, writes on a loose sheet of paper, and eats in a café; she walks through the streets in a black leather jacket, occasionally looking back. The editing brings their separate movements into an uncomfortable relationship, while red-lit close-ups of her eyes interrupt the greenish darkness outside. The ordinary business of getting through a night begins to feel charged with the possibility of being watched.
As the distance between them closes, the action moves into a narrow pedestrian underpass, its fluorescent lights leaving little room for either figure to disappear. Landers walks ahead while Gibbard follows, until a look back changes the balance between pursuer and pursued. The closing image gives heartbreak an abruptly physical form, making the familiar business of giving someone your heart seem like an offer best considered carefully.
Watch the video for Waiting below:
Gibbard and Landers formed Black Doldrums in London, initially working as a duo built around guitar, drums, and vocals before expanding into a trio. Their 2022 debut Dead Awake and 2024 follow-up In Limerence, both released through Fuzz Club, brought their early interests in psychedelia, drone, and reverb into a more concentrated gothic post-punk form. Extensive UK and European touring followed, including arena dates supporting Archive and their own headline shows.
Repetition Compulsion completes the band’s interconnected “State of Mind Trilogy,” exploring the emotional patterns people carry into relationships, memory, and self-understanding. Across eleven songs, the record expands those concerns into inherited behaviour, politics, and mental wellbeing. Waiting provides a particularly intimate connection between the trilogy’s final two chapters, holding affection and fixation close enough for their resemblance to become unsettling.
The album arrives November 13th, 2026, on 180-gram neon-yellow vinyl limited to 350 hand-numbered copies, 180-gram ultra-clear vinyl, and CD. Pre-order the album here. Listen below and order via Bandcamp.
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