Stephen Edmunds became a father and lost his job at the same time. That's the kind of collision that either breaks you or... becomes an album. Alone is the album. Stephen watched his daughter arrive into a world with fewer rights than her mother's, felt the technology in his pocket pulling at him the way it pulls at all of us, and decided to put it somewhere. Vinyl and cassette first, streaming later — a real act of defiance, even if it may feel small. The music marries industrial cold and synthpop warmth, sitting between rage and exhaustion, which is probably where Stephen himself was when he wrote it.

The album opens with "Beasts" — and immediately there's a hook, short and sticky like a playground chant. Then the verses open up, melodies unfolding slowly and almost tenderly. The production layers up into a living mass, muddy in places, but the muddiness of the textures feels like home: when you're singing about cold hell and hunger, the last thing you think of is clean air.

"Beasts" give way to "Angels". Crisp beat, straightforward pulsing bass. Chords sound distant and unsettling, but the voice carries warmth: "I’ve got angels watching over me." The warmth is channeled through the song's rock influences, including an acoustic guitar – a rare thing for a synth pop banger.

"God's Perfect Meme" is notable for its tasty, gooey bass riff with a tinge of acid house in its DNA. But even paired with a four-to-the-floor beat, the riff places the track's imaginary dance floor somewhere deep in a dark cave — the kind a prophet might call home. By the third track, these cave-shaped atmospheric textures already feel like a Neo Dimes trademark.

"Trigger" adds new colors to the palette — post-punk guitars that bring Joy Division to mind, while the rhythm track stays in synthpop's dark realm. Not fully, though: the bass tone and drums pull it toward drum & bass, a thread already laid down on "Beasts." Around 3:23 something shifts — melodic elements arrive paired with dark harmonies, and suddenly it's closer to Deep Forest's chopped vocals and Peter Gabriel-esque chords. The trance-gated synths only deepen that impression.

"Obsidian" picks up the ethno-pop torch in a non-obvious way: the drums are huge and absolutely tribal, like someone banging away at a dark ceremony. The hook advises to "pray for calm" — though given what's happening rhythmically, prayer alone feels like the wrong tool for the job.

The drums are equally huge on "Don't Think" – and the textures are smoky as always. Who or what hides in the smoke? You probably don't need to know:

Follow blind, follow me
Talk first, scream and growl
Control, distort the sound
Follow the rabbit down

At first the trip down the rabbit hole feels like a warm comfortable ride, but by the end of the song the horror starts to eat you alive:

All’s fair perpetrating mental warfare
Full stop, brainrot
Fatal construct
Don’t Think
In the end times now

The drums keep banging like hammers, and the synths cut through the air like sharp machetes.

"One Thing" combines distorted acidic synths, UK garage drums and fluffy, airy pluck melodies. The vocals range from totally detached to disarmingly emotional.

The guitars on "How to Love" instantly evoke Yuri Kasparyan's playing on Kino's classic later albums. The synths come from an absolutely different galaxy, millions of light years away. The song balances between all-embracing strength and disorienting powerlessness — which is reflected in the lyrics: "can you show me how to love, can you teach me how to trust, when I'm not strong enough?"

"It Comes and Goes" is both grandiose and genuinely hopeful — the kind of song that makes you imagine a stadium full of lighters swinging, strangers hugging, people crying without quite knowing why. The kind of crying that feels good, especially after everything the album has put you through — the hollow caves, the dark ceremonies, the rage and powerlessness.

"Dear Ghosts" closes the album in an equally epic and emotional way. The synths are massive, the strings cinematic — yet the vocals are heart-openingly intimate, almost uncomfortably, like someone whispering directly into your ear in a cathedral. "Dear ghost I hear your call, entombed in every psalm" — Neo Dimes lands in a peculiar place between bittersweet hope and liberating surrender. The door to the future is open. Whether you walk through it is your problem now.

Listening to Alone start to finish, you get the sense that Stephen Edmunds's way of making a statement was born out of an act of trying to survive something with open heart — the job gone, the daughter arrived, the world outside doing what it does. The album carries all of this pain, hope and uncertainty without waving it in your face. It stays honest all the way through, moving between cold and warm, between rage and tenderness, between tribal drums and intimate whispers, the way a difficult year actually feels when you're inside it. And maybe that's the point — albums like this don't just document difficult years. They help you get through them.