Behind “We Are All But Nothing” York’s grit meets Ghost and Killswitch.

How often do you take things for granted? Being alive for a new day, your friends and family or even the air that you breathe. It would take something substantial to unwind the clock and re-think how you run in an everyday mind.

York is a quintessential tourist city in northern England. Often overlooked and humble and bearing no real fame or success from its people bar the odd actor or writer, but its infamy is much stronger.

Garrow Hill’s relationship with this city is tied like a knot to our hearts: unable to pull away, deep and unrelenting, yet loathed and unwanted. We are the servants: the numbers, the shadows. Once the summer crowds dwindle and the bodies return to their families, the usual suspects remain, as always, to repair the tear in the void.

We have been musicians for many years, but nothing has provided a greater muse than the walls and graves of this gothic playground. There is macabre delight in digging around in your own back yard and finding out some of the lurid and despicable things that once took place. It’s easy to take York’s history for granted. Those cold, dark, rainy days in November hang heavy like the feeling of dread to a heart attack but creates the canvas on which we paint.

“Caught within two realms of those unseen,

Lost in the twilight, of what will never be” 

– Verse One of We Are All But Nothing.

This isn’t just poetry or empty words. There is belief and hurt behind these lines. We confront our doubts, drawing inspiration from our city’s maligned streets to craft #WAABN’s raw emotion-but the question always lingers…

The limestone walls and cobbled streets have lost souls underneath, sleeping, struggling. The noise can be harsh and violent yet beautiful in its grimy radiance. The dead lie in their graves, their silence deafening.

The ghosts of York are not in short supply: they watch from every window. We Are All But Nothing was written in the very presence of our ancestors. Where our feet have walked, so too have centuries of other people. From Romans and Vikings to peasants and murderers.

“The mind betrays, thoughts blurred, I slip away,

Maybe I’m lost, maybe this life I’ve lived was never real.”

– Verse Two We Are All But Nothing

If you close your eyes and mind; it all fades away. Is this the end? Writing this song has been a compilation of influences, from each other, our environment and our past. The struggle together is both profound and lonely. There is a voice willing to be heard. With all the frustration there is above all, a love letter to the puzzle. Why change what’s given you the material to write? The ultimate paradox, wrapped in life and death itself.

In the chorus its said we are all a “Ghost in this world, a prisoner of mind” we overlook the city’s darkness until it shapes our sound. A true statement of the disconnection between living and the feeling of alienation.

York’s haunted streets fuel Garrow Hill’s sound. “We Are All But Nothing,” released August 1, 2025, blends Entombed’s death metal edge, Killswitch Engage’s raw pre-chorus vocals, and Ghost’s spectral choruses. Written in a York studio, its lyrics—“Caught within two realms of those unseen”—reflect the city’s dark past and urban monsters.

“Even with nods to the past, nothing feels recycled… a song with purpose and structure.” – Edgar Allan Poets, Aug 2025.

Watch #WAABN on YouTube, comment your favorite riff, and share on X with #UKMetal! 

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