With “I’m Still Standing,” Frankie Muriel isn’t just releasing nine songs; he’s excavating a life lived in the key of rock and roll. The glam-metal swagger of KINGOFTHEHILL and the dance-floor pulse of Dr. Zhivegas are here, but only as ghosts in the machine—ancestral echoes beneath a sound that is grittier, warmer, and stained with the wisdom of survival. This is the sound of a man taking inventory.
The whole thing feels less like a straightforward narrative and more like an act of kintsugi—the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold lacquer. Muriel isn’t hiding the cracks of heartbreak, fatherhood, or personal failure; he’s tracing them with funk basslines and soul-inflected guitar, making them the most interesting part of the vessel. He wrestles with the complex physics of love: its pull, its decay, its sudden, startling regeneration. There’s no sonic indulgence here, just a taut, emotional groove that feels earned, like the comfortable quiet after a necessary argument.
For a moment, one track made me think of the specific, dusty smell of a sunbeam hitting an old velvet armchair. It’s that kind of record—it doesn’t just play, it triggers dormant senses. This is not the sound of a rocker raging against the dying of the light, but of someone who has sat with the darkness long enough to know its shape and is now simply walking toward the door, unafraid of what’s next.
Muriel’s journey from peacocking frontman to this soulful raconteur is palpable in every note. The resilience isn’t shouted from a mountaintop; it’s humming in the amplifier. So what do we do with our own beautiful scars when the music finally fades?
