By Stephanie King

Finnish five-piece Husky Rescue make the kind of ambient pop music capable of teleporting you to a land of snow and ice, fresh spruce forests and eye-watering sunshine. As the cold winds push us into spring, Husky Rescue’s The Sound of Love will ripple through your headphones like a chilling breath of Nordic air.

The song opens with gentle chimes and a faux-groovy bass line as Reeta-Leena Korhola’s glacial hiss creeps across the track. This woman doesn’t sing – she purrs. The sparkling music box sounds lull the listener into expecting another sweet Sally Shapiro-style dance track, but really all they share is the same niggling melancholy atmosphere, with Husky Rescue’s gritty guitars lending The Sound of Love a more sinister edge.



The laconic growl of the guitars builds a steady tension in the song; the throbbing bass line draws out a heart-pounding nerviness. Menaced by rat-a-tat-tat drums and taut strings, The Sound of Love shudders with loneliness for all its icy restraint. The toy-town prettiness of the repeated chimes is undermined by the droney strings and chugging guitars which leap into their own for the understated middle-eight. Reeta-Leena’s sultry drawl is overpowered by the beat, feeling more robotic as the song progresses and morphing into a detached cyborg solo dreaming of love that is beyond its reach.

The Sound of Love is cool, refined pop that removes all the hedonism from dance music and replaces it with a reserved, reflective ambience that soothes the head while stirring something altogether darker in the spirit. Following a sticky night dancing to Alphabeat, The Sound of Love offers a beautifully sullen soundtrack for that isolated moment when a late night flips into an early morning and sobriety dawns. In its own hush-hush way, The Sound of Love is oddly comforting.