“Driftwood” is a song about the suffocating drip of bad news – poverty, conflict and a world that keeps taking, and the decision to hold on to the person next to you when the world gives you every reason not to.
Yorkshire duo Seafret, Jack Sedman and Harry Draper, have spent a decade building a catalogue of emotionally direct folk-pop. “Driftwood” is the latest preview of their fourth album Fear of Emotion and sees them bring in James Morrison for their most striking collaboration to date.
Morrison’s worn, gospel-roughened rasp opens the song, Sedman follows with a smoother, more searching delivery, and the gap between those two registers becomes the emotional engine of the track. When both voices lock on the chorus, “all we’ve got, all we’ve got is love” sounds like a conclusion two people reached together. Steve Robson’s production opens on acoustic guitar before the arrangement stretches outward, strings and percussion pushing the song into a bigger space, and both voices ride it well.
There is a personal thread running through this one too: Jack Sedman reportedly sang along to Morrison in his bedroom as a teenager to test whether he could actually sing. Getting to make a record with him is the kind of full-circle moment that either produces something awkward or something truly charged.
The forward momentum of the instrumentation gives it the scale it needs, and together they deliver it with such conviction that by the final chorus, holding on to the person next to you feels less like a choice and more like the only thing that makes sense.
“Driftwood” is track six on Fear of Emotion, out later this month via Nettwerk. Seafret tour the UK and Europe from May 2026.
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