On July 10, 2025, post-hardcore band Sink With Me released their newest single “Stranger” which captures the sadness and grief of losing someone too soon, and at the end of it all, they don’t remember who you are. In the beginning of the single, there’s a melancholic tone to it between the two voices speaking that will automatically give you goosebumps on your skin. “Stranger” is filled with vocals that feel so hollow, but filled with devastating emotions as well, which is the true description of grief. Sadness, emptiness, and possibly anger, because grief brings out all those feelings in an individual, and that’s what you hear in Evan’s vocals throughout the whole single. “Stranger” is one of those singles that encapsulates the image of grief and vulnerability that has a visceral cry for help. “It’s almost like we never met” is a lyric in this single that gives the listener a vivid image of someone you love not knowing who you are and you’re wondering why life causes such mental torment. “Stranger” is a ballad of fractured memories that has a cathartic outcry for those who struggle continuing living this life without that one person who would consume all their emotions to make sure you felt safe and loved.
“I wrote the song about losing my mother to cancer, and how towards the end of her life she looked at me and didn’t know who I was. It is probably the most vulnerable I’ve been in a song, as a lot of it has little details and meanings that were specific to my mom, like her love of the color purple and butterflies. The intro talking snippet is also one of the last recordings of my mom’s voice talking to my sister before she declined cognitively and forgot us. ‘I love you mama, I love you too, can you smile?‘” – Evan (Vocals)
Interviewer: So you’re releasing a new single soon. Can you tell us a little bit about the song?
Evan: So this song in particular is a song I wrote about my late mother. She passed away back in 2018 from cancer. And for a very long time, I wasn’t really able to put into words, like, what she meant to me and what the song would be about. You know, how do you write and sum up and put in a three minute song how much someone meant to you, especially with it being, you know, your parent or your parents. But, so this song, I struggled with a lot particularly, because it just I wanted everything to, like, be perfect. It needed to feel like it was her song, which is why I never went out of my way to really write about her, since she passed. And then Steven, the guitarist for the band, he sent me a demo, funny enough titled it wasn’t intended that way, but he titled it mothership. And when I listened to it within the first fifteen seconds, I texted him. I’ll have to go find the text, but I texted him. I was like, yo. This is the song. His mother also passed away. I was like, this is the song that I think needs to be about our mothers and losing them. And so I started writing around her and trying to do justice in her memory and it was probably one of the hardest things I ever did because I struggled with it a lot to write the the vocal melodies and to really, solidify things in my head. I was overanalyzing it too much, but I just wanted it to be the perfect encapsulation of everything she meant. I wanted to have all the emotions in it and didn’t wanna really leave anything on the table when I came to talking about her. And Steven was a really big help with that.
We demoed a lot at his house, the vocal ideas, the chorus ideas, helped me really refine and get the lyrics kind of to a place where they weren’t so all over the place almost. He helped me push it all into the right direction of where it kind of all sits now. And then we went and recorded it, obviously, and, I think it all came together really well. And we were able to actually use a sound bite, of one of the very last videos of my mother, speaking with my youngest sister when she was still alive. And you can hear that her voice is starting to go, and that was a couple of weeks before she passed away.
I think the song itself is probably our our best work. And for me, it’s probably the most vulnerable in terms of something that I’ve written about that is near and dear to me because a lot of things I write about happen to be about the awful things that happened in my life and the trauma that I endured through my childhood. So it was different to write a song that’s like it’s a sad song, but it’s more of towards the memory of her and what she meant to me beyond the sadness.
Interviewer: I was gonna ask you as a vocalist, how did you channel your emotions creating this song? Like, if there were moments during recording where you broke down a little bit, or did you just push through all your emotions to create the single?
Evan: I don’t think I’ve ever broken down or paused for a minute. Because I’ve done it for so long that I get in and I do what I need to do. And the things that I write about and have always written about are very personable to me.
There’s something that I went through. It’s almost like I’m writing in a diary that I let everyone else hear and read. And in the moment listening back to some of the stuff and hearing it in real time it was like, wow, this is really coming together. This is awesome.
Interviewer: So are there any lyrics in this song that speaks directly about your mom or to your mom? Like, I’ll have to re-word that. Is there lyrics in your song that speaks directly to her or are meant to be a message to her?
Evan: Not so much like a message. So, there’s a couple of lines that specifically are, I guess, callbacks to my relationship with her. So there’s a line in the song. Well, the first one that’s not really directly to her, there’s a line where I said, after all this time, you weren’t invincible. Because when we grow up as kids, you think your parents are invincible. They have all the answers. They love you unconditionally, and they’re there for you. They always make it better. Obviously, not every parent, not everyone has that same situation, but for me, that’s what my mom was. So that was kind of a nod back to that of where, like, you know, I didn’t really think that this could happen to me. I didn’t think I could lose my mom this early in life.
And then my mom’s favorite color is purple, and she loved butterflies. So I have a line in the song that references that. And then the last two that are I guess directly tied into her, “you looked at me like a stranger in the room almost like we never met, and I’m not ready to forget”, which was one of the last times I saw my mom in hospice. She opened her eyes and she didn’t know who I was. I was just a stranger.
And that was really hard at the time to kind of accept. Obviously, I knew it was not her and it’s not like she had actually forgotten me. But at the time, it’s not the way it felt. And then one of my memories I have of my mom was when I was a child. I went into her room. I woke up in the middle of the night for whatever reason, and I was having an anxiety attack about what happens when you die.
And I was like, I couldn’t in my little brain, I could not fathom it. It didn’t make sense, and it scared me. Like, what’s after death? I have to know. And I’ll never forget it because what my mom said stuck with me for life and was something that I use throughout all of life to manage certain situations, but she told me that “someday everybody’s gonna die, but there’s no point in worrying about things you don’t have control over.”
Interviewer: What do you wish you could say to your mom right now through your music?
Evan: That’s hard. I think I would just want her to know that I’m okay, my siblings are okay, and that she would have loved her grandchildren, and then I miss her.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonglobe/name/karen-middleton-obituary?id=1680304
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