“Just With You” - Chandra
Photo Credit: Artist EPK
There’s something about certain songs that feel less like they were written and more like they were remembered — as if they’ve always existed somewhere in the background, just waiting for someone to bring them into the world. Just With You, the latest release from Bristol-based pop-rock outfit Chandra, falls neatly into that category.
At its heart, Just With You is about the sensory time machines we all carry around in our heads — the smell of your grandmother’s cooking, the sound of waves lapping a quiet shore. Chandra takes these fragments of memory and emotion and wraps them up in a feel-good pop-rock package that’s just as much about nostalgia as it is about connection. You don’t just listen to it; you sort of wander through it, like walking through an old house where every corner hides a piece of your past.
Musically, it’s polished without feeling sterile — a balance that can be tricky in modern pop-rock. There’s a bright acoustic undercurrent that carries the verses, opening up into a fuller, soaring chorus that’s built to make your chest expand just a little. It’s got that big, arms-wide-open energy, but it doesn’t overdo it. There’s restraint here, enough space for the lyrics to breathe, which is vital because the words are doing a lot of emotional heavy lifting.
And those lyrics — they’re not abstract poetry or metaphor overload. They’re direct, sensory, and surprisingly personal. “A perfect sunrise in the city / It warms your heart and sings a song,” opens the track like a snapshot you’ve pulled from a shoebox. There’s no pretension in this writing; it’s grounded in real, tactile things. Bluebells, buttercups, fresh cut grass — these aren’t random pretty images, they’re triggers for lived experiences. The song isn’t just telling you about nostalgia, it’s actually pulling you into your own.
The emotional weight behind the song isn’t just theoretical, either. Chandra himself has admitted that the writing process brought him to tears, and you can hear that vulnerability in the performance. The vocals carry that rare mix of strength and fragility — the sense that he’s pushing to hit every note perfectly, but without losing the rawness. It’s especially impressive when you know the melody sat right at the edge of his vocal range. That struggle becomes part of the song’s emotional DNA; you’re not just hearing him sing about vulnerability, you’re hearing him be vulnerable.
Photo Credit: Artist EPK
Producer Elliot Vaughan deserves some credit here too. His touch is evident in how the song flows — there’s a subtle build, a kind of emotional pacing that stops it from hitting the chorus too soon or dragging out the verses. Vaughan also apparently coaxed the final vocal out of Chandra when the range was proving a challenge. You can sense that trust between artist and producer, which probably has a lot to do with why the song lands as authentically as it does.
What’s striking about Just With You is how universal it feels without becoming generic. It’s not your story — and yet, somehow, it is. You fill in the blanks with your own places, your own first loves and summer evenings. And maybe that’s the magic of it: the song becomes a mirror for your own life, just as much as it’s a confession of Chandra’s.
In the end, Just With You isn’t just a single — it’s a reminder. That your life is stitched together from a thousand tiny sensory moments, and that the right person can make sharing them feel like the most important thing in the world. It’s hopeful without being naive, sentimental without being saccharine, and polished without losing its human edge.
Chandra have set themselves a high bar for future releases — but if this is the emotional territory they’re staking out, I’d say they’re on very solid ground.
“Just With You” is available now on all major streaming platforms
