by Jack Mercer
Rusty Halo calls this thing “City Ballad,” which is funny in the same way that calling a switchblade a piece of cutlery is funny. Technically, nobody is lying. But London’s Rusty Halo has not made a ballad in the traditional sense. There are no soft-focus confessions or tasteful piano chords here. This is a bruised, combustible piece of hard rock that staggers out of the city at dawn with blood on its shirt, static in its skull and no intention of explaining where it has been. Spotify suggestions landed this banger on my radar, and boy am I glad it did!
The first sound that grabs you is Altin Gjoni’s wild slide guitar, wailing across the introduction like a police siren from another dimension. Gjoni does not simply decorate the track; he tears open its atmosphere. His slide work is bluesy without becoming nostalgic, pulling notes upward until they seem ready to snap. It establishes the song’s essential mood before Mircha Ivens has sung a word: something is wrong in this city, something hurts, and nobody is getting out clean.
Then Adriaan Kasteleijn’s riffs enter and give that unease a body. Kasteleijn, who wrote the guitar riffs and plays the first solo, is the architect of the song’s hard-rock foundation. His guitar has weight, discipline and forward motion. Where Gjoni’s slide prowls around the arrangement like a half-starved animal, Kasteleijn builds the road beneath it. His opening solo does not arrive as ornamental fretboard gymnastics; it pushes the song deeper into its own disturbed psychology.
The dynamic between the two guitarists is the record’s secret weapon. Kasteleijn creates structure while Gjoni threatens it. Later, Gjoni’s percussive solo treats the guitar like both a melodic instrument and a piece of industrial machinery. He strikes, scrapes and punctuates, finding rhythm inside distortion. The result is not two guitarists competing for territory, but two distinct musical personalities arguing over what the city has done to them.
Mircha Ivens enters that argument with a voice full of accusation. “See your way of life!” he cries, immediately throwing the listener into a confrontation involving pride, compromise and spiritual exhaustion. When he describes being “caught inside your pride,” the lyric does not sound like a philosophical observation. It sounds like somebody pointing across a table after midnight and finally saying the thing everyone else has been avoiding.
The song’s most fascinating contradiction arrives when Ivens admits that he feels out of time while repeatedly insisting that he feels all right. Nobody who must say it that many times is entirely all right. The phrase becomes a nervous ritual, an attempt to hold the mind together through repetition. Behind him, the band keeps grinding forward, exposing the reassurance as a fragile defense against a much uglier question: “How can our lives have turned to this?”
That is the real subject of “City Ballad.” It is not simply about London, or any one city. It is about waking up inside a life you once chose and no longer recognize.
When Ivens declares, “In this city! I bled!” the line becomes the song’s battered heart. The city is not scenery. It is an antagonist, an addiction and a repository for every abandoned version of the self. Its trails are populated by phantoms—old ambitions, old relationships, old mistakes and all the people one might have become. Still, the voice keeps repeating that it is alive, as though survival must be spoken aloud before it can be believed.
Rusty Halo understands that repetition can turn language into pressure. The insistence that “this wheel never spins” captures the paralysis beneath the song’s motion. Everyone is moving, traffic is roaring, buildings are rising and lives are being spent, yet nothing essential appears to change. That is followed by the urgent command, “It’s time to move it!” What could have been a simple rock-and-roll chant instead sounds like emergency advice. Move before pride buries you. Move before the city absorbs what remains. Move because time has already started stealing from you.
Bassist Franco Fiaschetti and drummer Cristian Prigoana (current members are Ryan Hale on bass and Marc Nordhausen on Drums) keep that urgency from flying apart. Fiaschetti provides a dark, sturdy floor beneath the guitar collision, while Prigoana drives the track with the physical force required to contain its volatility. They do not sterilize the performance. They give its chaos direction.
The later lyrics turn inward as the city passes through the narrator’s mind. Ivens sings of falling and rising “again a thousand times,” a phrase that captures the punishing cycle of urban survival. A city knocks you down, teaches you how to stand, then charges you rent for the pavement where you landed. Rusty Halo does not romanticize that endurance, but neither does the band dismiss its strange nobility.
The emotional mask finally cracks when Ivens asks to be awakened and told that life is all right. He dreams of everything he should have said and done, and the song’s outward aggression suddenly reveals its source: regret. All the distortion, shouting and swagger surround a basic human terror—the fear that life is passing before we have truly participated in it.
Even the breathy “shh” and “ah” exchanges become part of this unraveling. They sound like attempts to control breathing during a panic attack, followed by laughter that lands somewhere between release and hysteria. By the time Ivens reaches the idea of being “alive and alone,” those two states have become inseparable.
Then comes the final warning: “We’re gonna run out of time!”
Rusty Halo repeats it because once is not enough. The guitars swell, Ivens howls and the entire performance appears to race an invisible clock. There is no clean resolution because the song does not believe in one. There is only the demand to wake up, move and recognize the blood you have already left behind.
“City Ballad” carries echoes of Zeppelin’s physical swagger, Soundgarden’s shadowed weight and Queen’s theatrical reach, but Rusty Halo is not playing dress-up in somebody else’s rock-and-roll wardrobe. Adriaan Kasteleijn’s riffs and first solo supply muscle and direction. Altin Gjoni’s feral slide introduction and percussive solo inject danger. Mircha Ivens turns regret into an urban exorcism, while Franco Fiaschetti and Cristian Prigoana hold the whole beautiful collision together.
This is a song for everyone who has loved a city, hated it, escaped it and discovered that it followed them home. Rusty Halo has taken pride, broken hopes, loneliness and the terror of wasted time and fed them through a wall of amplifiers.
It is not pretty. It is not polite. It is alive.
Learn more at the official Rusty Halo website.
