The Cope – recently released the single “Low”

There is a particular kind of honesty that only arrives in retrospect. When David Anthony Curley wrote the lyrics to Low (The Cope’s latest release) back in 2022, it wasn’t about any one thing. It was, as he describes it, “a rationalisation and response to my mood, my affect, my approach to my own general mental health.” A song about the internal weather of a person who has learned, perhaps too well, to hold their thoughts in and their words too. To lie, softly, to themselves and others, not out of malice but out of the quiet self-protection that low periods demand. 

Joe Furlong came to the song differently. For him, Low is about the paralysis of the crossroads, that specific feeling of being stuck between a difficult truth and the fear of what saying it aloud might cost you. “Feelings don’t exist in a vacuum,” he reflects. “Contrasting emotions give greater context to one another, and life is all about finding the balance.” In Joe’s reading, the low of the title is not an ending but a necessary point of reference, the place from which, once you’ve allowed yourself to sit with it, you can begin again. 

Two interpretations, both true, but neither complete without the other. 

Then in 2024 the video was made, and the meaning of the song changed again, as meaning sometimes does when art and grief collide. 

Conor Biddle, the acclaimed Irish lighting designer and one of the most singular creative forces The Cope have had the privilege of working with, passed away in April 2025 after contributing to this project. He was a collaborator, a friend, and in the truest sense a co-author of the visual world The Cope inhabit. His lighting did not merely illuminate a room. It made the room feel something, it made people feel something. 

In his absence, Low became something else entirely. The same words, the same melody, but now the song holds grief alongside everything it held before. It moves between sadness for a departed friend, for those he loved, and with the complicated honesty the song has always asked for, a more private sadness too. The kind that asks how you continue to make things without the people who made you believe in the making of them. 

This release is dedicated to Conor Biddle. It is one of the last works he touched, and it carries him in every frame and every beat. 

“Do you feel it sometimes? It’s some kind of low.” 

“Some songs take years to find what they’re really about.” · The Cope 

Artwork by Kate Lawlor