'Alive', the new single from Antwerp trio BLUAI, started with guilt. Songwriter and guitarist Catherine Smet wrote it in the shadow of her grandmothers' deaths. Not just as an act of mourning, but as a reckoning with all the time she hadn't taken. The visits deferred, the conversations half-had, the presence that was never quite fully given. "The question becomes," the band reflect, "how many relationships, how many moments, slip through our fingers because we fail to live them fully, with the intensity they deserve?"
From that guilt came something less expected: a near-desperate urge to be here, fully, right now. 'Alive' moves between grief and appetite without resolving the distance between them. It's a song about the particular kind of restlessness that follows loss. The realization that you've been living at a remove from your own life, and the determination, however ragged, to stop.
The song carries that tension without spelling it out. There's room in it for different kinds of longing: the loss of someone gone, the loss of time wasted, the specific ache of queer heartbreak, and the band has kept that space open deliberately. What holds it together isn't a single reading but a single feeling: the hunger to be alive in a way you weren't before.
BLUAI have spent the past year playing to audiences far outside Belgium. Festival crowds in the UK, the Netherlands, Spain and Austria, club shows that have extended their reach well beyond what their debut album ‘Save It For Later’ (2024) first mapped out. That accumulated live experience shapes how 'Alive' sounds: direct, physical, a band that knows how a song needs to move in a room.
BLUAI play Pukkelpop in August and De Roma in Antwerp in 2027, and head out on a UK run in October supporting The Clockworks.