There’s a moment on ‘Oh I Forgot’ where Leigh Arthur’s voice seems to lean in just a little closer. Where everything else falls away and the full weight of memory hits like a warm gust, momentarily lifting everything. It doesn’t announce itself; it just blooms. That’s the kind of song this is. Quietly devastating. A minor-keyed, heart-stung hymn that burrows in without bluster.
A veteran of some of Ireland’s most vital DIY outfits – Dublin lo-fi punk greats Sissy and, for a time, post-punk trio Extravision – Arthur has long carved out a singular presence in the underground. Her current chapter as a member of London power-pop band Grazia and vocalist with Music City continues that throughline of tenacity and self-possession. But ‘Oh I Forgot’ her debut solo offering, reveals a whole new dimension: radically vulnerable, outlined by heartache, yet glinting with joy.
Now based in London, Arthur wrote the song during a period of quiet disarray in the aftermath of lockdown, when life felt shapeless and unmoored. “It is about being so low that I hadn’t felt joy in a long time. I was at a point where I was crying everyday, while working from home during the pandemic. When lockdown restrictions were lifted from 5km to 20km radius, I was able to visit my parents, who lived just a few hundred yards past that threshold. I took the now deceased 46a bus to see my now deceased dog, Barley – who was alive at the time.”
“I made myself do the only thing I could think of to feel better, to sit with him and pet him until it was time to get the bus back home that evening. So, I sat with him in my parents’ back garden and petted him until I felt the slightest hint of something slightly better. That was all, and it worked. Although it wasn’t joy as we know it, something had gotten in through the thick fog of sadness and dissociation I was struggling to see out of. It reminded me how better feelings used to feel and that maybe those could happen again.”
“I moved into my parents house a few months later, which was an insane thing to do – move back to live with my parents as an adult. They had moved house since I last lived with them, and now they were just a short walk from the sea. So, I set myself a mantra of sorts, that I had two things to keep me afloat: the sea and the dog, as long as I had those I could be okay. He loved the sea and I loved him. I wrote this song to parse some of these feelings out. To lay them on the table in front of me, have a look at them and go, “Oh, so that’s what I’m feeling.”
That honesty hits like a tide returning. “Take me home to a place I’ve never lived,” she sings, her voice a rich, full-bodied croon – Orbison-esque in its swoon, but cut with an edge. “I am strong, yes, but I’m sick of it.” The lines tumble like a confession written in a half-sleep state, dense with contradictions and exhausted hope.
The song’s woozy emotional pull is deepened by its production: gentle twang, one deeply burrowing refrain and a bridge that stuns – at once haunted and luminous, like light peering through stained glass. It’s a reclamation of memory and an invocation of something better, a fleeting sense of clarity in the thick of it all. “Oh I forgot I could ever feel like this,” she sings, and it’s not a throwaway line: it’s the axis the whole track turns on.
That honesty extends to the track’s visuals, which were spliced together from old footage of Barley, her late dog, taken during a period when the smallest things – sunlight, a plastic moustache toy, cherry blossoms – held everything up. “The whole video is made of videos I took of Barley on one of those April days when the sun comes out. In a similar way: it’s easy to forget the sun will come out again and you’ll feel better, anything other than the constant gnawing of life. He was just being adorable. I was living back with my parents at that point. They lived in a different house than the house I grew up in. It was like moving home but to a different place that I’ve never called home.”
That sense of dislocation, of reaching for familiarity in unfamiliar terrain, colours the song. As does the way Arthur clings to elemental things: touch, sunlight, sea air, the weight of a creature you love falling asleep beside you. “I thought there’s two things that’s going to keep my head afloat here. One is Barley and one is the sea, and he loved the sea as well.”
The way Arthur speaks about this time is disarmingly direct, never cloaked in metaphor. “It’s weird to explain it because it’s about how joyful he made me feel, he made me remember that feeling,” she says. The track is not a retrospective elegy. It’s something harder to locate. A testimony to a time when things were not yet okay, but they flickered towards okayness.
Even now, as solo material is starting to be shared with the world, that internal dialogue remains intact. Now that I’m at the point for people to hear this music, I almost forget that nobody has already heard these before because I’ve gone over it so much and they ring so true to me at a point of my life.”
The power of ‘Oh I Forgot’ lies in that exact private intimacy. It doesn’t posture or reach for impact. It invites you in, lays everything down plainly and without defence. As Arthur says: “It was kind of like doing justice to the feeling and following that feeling and not knowing where it would go, but I had to find out.”
In that way, ‘Oh I Forgot’ is almost certain to be one of the Irish tracks of the year. A (re)-arrival from an artist whose voice and vision, always clear-eyed, now feels essential. This is music made not for performance but survival.
Londoners, catch Leigh Arthur live:
4th April at The Waiting Room, London
17th May at New River Studios, London
