Some memories don’t return because we want to relive them. They return because we want to understand who we were before they happened. It sits between the longing and the acceptance, where a heartbreak that once felt permanent becomes something different when viewed through the distance of time.
From their forthcoming album, Might Just Be Enough (August 21st), “Seventeen” by Young Martyrs captures the strange grief of looking back at a time when everything felt overwhelming and realising that the pain eventually became part of the journey. The drums feel like a steady and persistent heartbeat running beneath the entire track, pulling one back toward a memory that refuses to disappear. It’s an emotional weight often left to the vocals, but in this track it adds a warmth to the arrangement that echoes of the open and searching guitar tones of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”.
This song understands that looking backwards often means seeing what was beautiful and what needed to end. Capturing that duality is Tom Corneill’s vocal performance. There is the ache of someone remembering a love that once felt impossible to lose, but there is also the understanding of someone who has already lived beyond it. He doesn’t sound trapped inside the heartbreak. He sounds like someone examining the person he was when it happened and recognising that the thing he misses may not have been the relationship at all.
Halfway through, the guitar solo feels like the bridge between those two versions of himself. It carries the spirit of what came before while reaching toward everything that came after. It feels less like a tribute to a lost moment and more like an acknowledgement that every version of ourselves leaves something behind. The song doesn’t erase the heartbreak or pretend it wasn’t important. It simply reminds us that sometimes the things we thought broke us were the same things that allowed us to become someone new.
Catch Young Martyrs live
- August 14th 2026 – The Thunderbolt, Bristol
- August 29th 2026 – (unplugged) Bluebird Cafe, Wedmore
- August 30th 2026 – (unplugged) Roman Baths, Bath Spa
- September 12th 2026 – Frome Cheese Show, Frome
- September 13th 2026 – (solo show) The Pulpit, Swindon
- September 16th 2026 – The Half Moon Putney, London
- September 18th 2026 – The Thatch, Croyde
- September 19th 2026 – Project 83, Newquay
- September 24th 2026 – The Castle, Swindon
- September 25th 2026 – Electric Bear Brewing, Bath
