There is a moment near the end of Burning Lake's 'Below The Surface' when the entire record seems to turn on itself.
For most of the Swiss quartet's six-song EP, the conflicts are personal: lovers separated by an ocean, a friend suddenly gone, an immigrant caught between countries, a father running out of time with his son, a man holding onto a love that isn't really his.
Then "Little Man" arrives.
Suddenly the loneliness that has quietly haunted 'Below The Surface' becomes something more dangerous. Isolation becomes grievance. Grievance becomes anger. Anger needs someone to blame.
It's a striking conclusion to an EP that spends much of its running time examining what happens when the connections people depend upon begin to disappear.
Burning Lake's story itself began with waiting. Pandemic delays held up the band's debut album, *Coming Into Shore*, until 2023. During that period, the Swiss saying "Il n'y a pas le feu au lac," essentially, "the lake is not on fire," became both a reassuring reminder that there was no need to panic and the inspiration for the band's name.
The lineup of Peter Bordui on guitar and vocals, Mathieu Karcher on electric guitar, Pierangleo Crescenzio on bass and Marcol Savoy on drums followed *Coming Into Shore* with 'Below The Surface', releasing its songs individually throughout 2025 and 2026.
If their debut introduced Burning Lake, this EP gives a clearer picture of what interests them as songwriters. These are songs about people discovering that the things they assumed were permanent often aren't.
"Hold The Line" begins with perhaps the most mundane crisis on the record: a bad phone connection.
Calls drop. Software updates. Voicemail answers. Static replaces conversation.
Behind all of it is a couple attempting to maintain a relationship from opposite sides of the world.
The track is upbeat, even optimistic, and Burning Lake cleverly allows the phrase at its center to do two jobs. "Hold the line" is what you say when you're trying to keep someone on the phone. Here, it also becomes a plea to keep a relationship intact.
There's a fitting symmetry to how the song was written. Bordui says its chorus and melody came to him while bicycling near his home in Switzerland during the spring. He finished the verse lyrics on another bicycle ride that summer, this time in Wisconsin.
Two rides on two continents for a song about two people separated by exactly that kind of distance.
The optimism disappears quickly on "Horse Without A Rider."
Bordui was sitting at his computer with a guitar when an email arrived informing him that a close friend had unexpectedly died. His friend was a horseman, and amid the shock, one thought struck Bordui with unusual force: somewhere, his friend's horse had just lost its rider.
He began playing and wrote most of the song before leaving the chair.
That immediacy remains in the finished recording.
Instead of attempting to summarize a life or manufacture a grand statement about death, "Horse Without A Rider" stays close to the disorientation that follows sudden loss. There are people to call, offices to notify and practical details that seem absurdly normal when something profoundly abnormal has just happened.
Underneath it sits a down-tempo acoustic guitar groove, joined gradually by bass, percussion, backing vocals and country-flavored electric guitar.
The song's most powerful choice is also its simplest. Burning Lake keeps returning to the horse.
The world continues moving. Rivers flow. Wind moves through trees. The sun will probably rise tomorrow.
But tonight, there's a horse without a rider.
Sometimes grief really is that specific.
"Not Going Home" approaches displacement from the perspective of people who have actually experienced changing countries and living as immigrants. Musically, it's one of the EP's departures, leaning into a reggae groove while adding percussion, keyboard accents, modulations and a stripped-down solo break.
Lyrically, the song understands that immigration can create a peculiar form of homelessness that has nothing to do with lacking a physical place to live.
At first, the narrator is simply the outsider: sleeping on a station bench, struggling with language and learning the rules of an unfamiliar society.
Eventually, though, he adapts.
And that's when the more complicated problem emerges.
He returns to the place he once considered home expecting familiarity, only to discover that it feels different. The place has changed. He has changed too.
The title suddenly carries considerably more weight.
He's not going home because, in some sense, he no longer knows exactly where home is.
"If We Had More Time" brings the EP into a smaller room.
A father notices that his son's light is still on. He's surprised the boy is awake. They begin talking, but the father is only passing through. A driver will soon arrive to take him to the airport.
What follows is a conversation filled with good intentions.
They should spend a weekend together. Maybe they could go hiking. Maybe New York City. The father asks whether school is getting better and whether the kids are leaving his son alone. Perhaps he can call the teacher.
None of these are extraordinary promises, which is exactly why they hurt.
The father isn't absent emotionally. He clearly cares. His tragedy is that nearly everything meaningful seems scheduled for later.
Bordui places one phrase beneath all those possibilities: "If we had more time."
Finger-picked acoustic guitar and warm backing vocals keep the track intimate, while the lyrics resist forcing a confrontation between father and son. There doesn't need to be one. The airport ride waiting outside says enough.
By the final verse, the father tells the boy it's time to sleep because it's time for him to fly. If they can't actually be together, perhaps they can meet in the child's dreams.
It is one of 'Below The Surface's saddest ideas: love measured not by its absence, but by all the things someone genuinely intends to do and somehow never gets around to doing.
"Beautiful Lie" trades familial distance for romantic longing.
Its world is almost deliberately picturesque. There are snowflakes, streetlights, moonlight and the sound of an imagined angel choir. The narrator remembers the person beside him with obsessive tenderness.
The problem is that she doesn't really love him back.
Rather than demanding honesty, he asks for the opposite. Give him the lie. Let him have the illusion a little longer.
The steady acoustic guitar is gradually surrounded by bass, electric guitars and backing vocals, but the song never needs some enormous climax to resolve its tension. There isn't a resolution available. The narrator already understands the truth. His problem is that understanding it hasn't made him ready to accept it.
Then Burning Lake pulls the floor out.
"Little Man" was born from aggressive music Bordui had been carrying around without suitable lyrics. During the summer of 2024, while in the United States amid the presidential campaign, he recognized a subject that matched it.
The result is unlike anything else on the EP.
"Little Man" assumes the voice of authoritarian populism rather than describing it from the outside. It begins by telling its subject that other people are responsible for holding him back.
From there, the escalation is methodical.
Distrust education. Fear outsiders. Silence disagreement. Use the army. Imprison opponents. Hurt them.
With every chord change, the meter changes as well, giving the music an agitated, unpredictable quality.
But the smartest moment comes at the end.
After spending the song identifying groups and individuals who must be eliminated, the language contracts further and further until the narrator suddenly realizes that he may have joined the list himself.
"Little Man get rid of... me?"
It's an unnerving final question because Burning Lake leaves it unanswered.
The six tracks were recorded with the full band playing live at Kitchen Studio in Geneva, an approach that helps explain the natural interplay throughout the EP. Irish sisters The Woodgies added backing vocals during a separate session, while guitar and vocal overdubs were completed in several of the musicians' home studios in the region. Tom Maeder handled the final mixing and mastering in Basel.
That live-band foundation suits Burning Lake particularly well. 'Below The Surface' doesn't feel constructed around production. The arrangements seem to grow outward from the stories.
And those stories share more DNA than might initially be apparent.
Nearly everyone on this record is trying to hold onto something.
The lovers in "Hold The Line" fight to maintain a relationship across an ocean. "Horse Without A Rider" confronts a connection severed permanently by death. The immigrant in "Not Going Home" discovers that his connection to home has changed. The father in "If We Had More Time" keeps postponing the connection his son needs now. The narrator of "Beautiful Lie" would rather preserve an imaginary connection than accept losing it.
Even "Little Man," for all its aggression, begins with someone being offered a poisonous answer to his own sense of alienation.
That thread gives 'Below The Surface' more weight than its modest six-song running length might suggest.
Burning Lake isn't reinventing folk-rock here, and the band doesn't appear particularly interested in trying. What it does instead is harder to fake: take recognizable human experiences and locate the small detail that makes each one feel personal.
A broken phone call.
An empty saddle.
A station bench.
An airport car waiting outside.
Snowflakes in someone's hair.
And, finally, a frightened man discovering that the hatred he embraced may no longer distinguish between enemy and ally.
On 'Below The Surface', Burning Lake understands that sometimes the smallest image is the one that reveals everything underneath.
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