With their latest single, Kissing The Flint’s “Windscreen Dream” offers the kind of country rock you feel in your teeth—a low, satisfying hum of forward motion. This is a song built like a classic roadster; every part is an essential component of the kinetic engine. Huey Dowling’s guitars lay down the tarmac, Derek Urquhart’s drums are the steady thump of wheels on the joins in the road, and that glorious swell of Marc Clement’s Hammond B3 is the heat rising from the bonnet. It all moves with a purpose that feels less like a joyride and more like an escape.
There is a profound severance happening here. This isn’t a wistful glance in the rearview mirror; it’s the surgical act of making the past insignificant. Leah Chynoweth-Tidy’s vocal delivery has the calm authority of someone who has already made the most difficult decision and is now simply living out the consequence—a consequence that, for once, feels like pure freedom. The song documents the drive away from a world revealed to be a phantom, a relationship built on smoke.
For a moment, listening to Graham Rodger’s steel pedal glide through the melody, I was inexplicably reminded of the smell of petrichor—that scent of the first rain hitting parched, dusty earth after a long drought. That’s the feeling embedded in this track. It’s not just relief; it’s the promise of life returning to a landscape that was emotionally barren, the dust of deception finally settling under a cleansing shower of self-realisation.
The song seems to understand that the destination is irrelevant when the act of leaving is so nourishing. “Windscreen Dream” doesn’t just ask where you’re going; it dares you to consider what, exactly, you’ve finally gained the strength to drive away from.
