21 September 2026 – Before the End of Time Gives Claire Cronin's The Bruise Another Haunting Preview

The Bruise is getting closer, and Claire Cronin has offered another unsettling route into it with Before the End of Time. Released as the album's second single, the song finds Cronin exploring nostalgia, grief and apocalyptic anxiety through the kind of intimate songwriting that has made the description 'folk horror' follow her work around.

The track's instrumentation includes strings by Ezra Buchla and musical saw from Mark Wessels, choices that sound perfectly at home in a song where emotional unease is more important than conventional grandeur. Cronin has explained that memories of walking through East Hollywood beneath circling helicopters fed into the song, alongside an imagined image of an old crooner singing to victims of a shipwreck. It is vivid material, yet what makes Cronin interesting is the restraint with which she handles it.

The horror in these songs doesn't need a monster to enter the room; the room itself already feels slightly wrong. The accompanying crowd-sourced video extends that sense of collective memory and dislocation. As The Bruise approaches, Before the End of Time suggests an album interested in the point where personal dread meets much larger fears — and where an acoustic folk horror song can feel heavier than plenty of amplified ones.