Hemi Hemingway – Wings of Desire (PNKSLM Recordings) (13th Floor Album Review)
Hemi Hemingway’s Wings of Desire arrives as a record of late-night longing, full of pulse, soft-focus melancholy, and sudden flashes of heat.
It opens with a line that feels like both invocation and intent: “I wanna live on the wings of desire.” The title carries a cinematic charge, a nod toward Wim Wenders’ film of angels drawn down into human feeling, and Hemingway’s songs share that same gravity. They move through desire, distance, rupture, and return, always attentive to the emotional weather of the city.
Behind the name is Shaun Blackwell, an Aotearoa songwriter who first shaped this project in London’s post-punk and garage-rock scenes before returning home. On Wings of Desire, the persona feels fully inhabited, and the sound is widened by collaboration. Produced with James Goldsmith, who gives the arrangements space to bloom into lush, widescreen swells, the album brings in featured vocalists Georgia Gets By and Vera Ellen, while saxophone lines from players including Zelia Shaw and Toby Leman add smoky nocturnal colour to the record’s key moments.
The album’s sonic home is 80s art-pop: Talk Talk’s polished pulse, Roxy Music’s after-dark sax, and Matt Johnson’s plainspoken ache with The The. A sleek electronic pulse runs through the songs, guitars buzz and circle at the edges, and everything unfolds patiently rather than rushing toward obvious climax. Hemingway’s baritone anchors it all, a voice that can croon with softness one moment and darken into something more dangerous the next.
The title track, Wings of Desire, eases guitar, bass and drums into place under Hemingway’s half-spoken croon, riding rhythm more than melody. Noise falls away so the vocal can land clearly, then returns in a slow surge pulling the song onward. Regret flickers through the refrain, simple and devastating: “I shoulda called you, baby.”
From there, the album leans into motion. This City’s Tryna Break My Heart brings electronic drums and circling guitars, a New Romantic sheen made for neon-lit streets. When Hemingway sings “this city’s tryna break my heart again,” the track becomes propulsive and restless, his voice assertive as the beat gathers force. Desiree continues that momentum, locking drums and synth into a throbbing pulse where intimacy becomes danceable pressure.
Even at its brightest, the album carries weight. Promises, featuring Georgia Gets By’s tender vocal, slows everything into echo and space. Bass notes stretch beneath entwined voices, the lyric landing with quiet force before the arrangement dissolves into haze, saxophone cutting through like a blade of light. (To Be) Without You follows with a steady synth heartbeat, Hemingway delivering the album’s starkest aftermath line with blunt clarity: “To be without you is lonely and new.” Around him, textures shimmer and drop away, loneliness learning its new rhythm.
At the record’s dark centre, 6th April ’13 arrives with a low bass rumble, like a freight train in the night. Ethereal strings glide above the pulse, colouring Hemingway’s voice as it deepens into something unsettled. Midway through, the track surges into dance-floor intensity, synth lines pushed toward breaking point, heartbreak turning into acceleration. It is the album’s rupture point, where longing becomes something sharper and harder to contain.
In the aftermath, the record begins to recalibrate. Long Distance Lover glows with keys and bubbling beat, Hemingway sounding weary and direct. The sax returns, swapping places with the vocal until both join in a brief moment of release. If Love Is a Winter’s Day holds itself in suspension, a snare drum and recurring synth line circling one another, the song resolving with unexpected warmth.
The album shifts again with Oh, My Albertine, featuring Vera Ellen, whose vocal is recorded with close, conversational warmth alongside Hemingway’s. Slow acoustic guitar strums and reflective vocals gradually swell into a fuller band, drums rolling and crashing like emotional weather. The track winds itself tighter, then drops back to voice and reverb, two singers speaking into the space between them.
The closing No Future No Future No Future brings urgency without collapsing into punk nihilism. Bass and drums rumble ominously as guitars fire across a stuttering beat. Hemingway’s vocal feels like advice delivered under pressure, tension increasing until the song is just about holding together, desire transformed into something necessary and alive.
Wings of Desire glows with contradiction, romantic and restless, intimate and atmospheric. It begins in yearning and ends in insistence, as if the act of wanting has become urgent. Hemingway’s great achievement here is that he never treats desire as soft-focus romance. He treats it as something human and necessary, the force that pulls you back into colour, consequence, and life itself.
John Bradbury
Wings of Desire out Friday 20 February 2026 Pre-order HERE
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