I went three months last winter without wanting anyone. I had just gone completely flat and did not give a shit about finding my way back. I cancelled plans I actually cared about and stopped replying to texts from men I liked. My best friend finally dragged me out in February to a club night I had already bailed on twice, showed up at my door before I could say no again. Somewhere around the second hour the DJ dropped something that hit the floor hard and I felt my hips move before I had made any decision about it. That was the moment. My own body just decided it was done sitting this out. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror on the way back from the bar and thought okay there you fucking are. Beau Bowen’s ‘No More Cryin” is that mirror moment – the one where you stop waiting to feel like yourself and realize you already do.
This is the duo’s electro-pop declaration that the dark place you’ve been sitting in has an exit and it sounds like walking out of it in slow motion while everything behind you is on fire. The production is built on percussion that hits with the kind of purpose that makes your body reorganize its priorities with synth riffs that smell like 1984 stacked over CJ’s rock guitars in a way that makes the whole thing feel bigger than a room can hold. Monti’s vocal makes you stop whatever you’re doing, and the chorus is enormous in a way that just takes over the room. This is the sound of coming back stronger and not looking back for a single damn second, and Beau Bowen are supporting it with a black and white performance video and live dates in London that, frankly, sound like a fucking event.
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Monti opens the song right at the bottom of it. “I’ve been down feeling underground / Looking for a reason to care / I was lost in my Gormenghast / Lonely shadows everywhere.” The Gormenghast reference is the line that stopped me cold. It is Mervyn Peake’s Gothic labyrinth, a castle of endless corridors where nothing changes and no light finds you, and using it as shorthand for that specific kind of depression is goddamn brilliant because it names the structure of the thing. A dark period has walls. I have furnished a few of them with designer leather sofas and chairs which is not something I am proud of but is absolutely something I understand. “Looking for a reason to care” is the line that cuts deepest because that is the quietest version of rock bottom – the one that does not look dramatic from the outside but is absolutely fucking suffocating from the inside.
Then she turns toward the person who changed it. “Out of the darkness and into the light / You were there beside me / You were there to guide me.” What she is describing is someone who showed up and stayed – the understated kind of save that does more than any grand gesture ever could and if you have been in that underground long enough you know that is the sexiest shit a person can do for you. I have dated men who could not handle a bad week. Monti found the other kind.
The chorus is three lines and it carries the whole weight of the damn thing. “No more cryin’ / All night / Baby you know I’m back.” That “baby you know I’m back” has a hell of a swagger after everything the verse just laid out. She is making a declaration. The comeback is already done, fully processed, and Monti delivers that line like she has been saving it since the first night she found the exit.
The second verse is where she hands him his full credit and does not hold a single thing back. “You brought me out of misery / A sanctuary from the pain / You took my hand and we made a stand / You taught me how to love again.” Sanctuary is the word that gets me, because that is a whole different category of person and most of us spend years confusing it with someone who is just fun to be around. She found the real thing, the kind of person who rebuilds your capacity for love after something has taken it apart, and she delivers every word of it like she knows damn well how rare that is.
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Beau Bowen are a London-based electro-pop duo and they are also, for the record, a married couple which means they write songs together and then go home to each other and honestly that is either the most romantic thing I have ever heard or the most intense situation imaginable, probably both. Monti is the powerhouse vocalist and CJ handles guitar and co-vocals and together they build a sound that drags dance floor energy into arena-rock territory and makes the whole collision feel fucking inevitable. They record in a 500-year-old barn studio which is the kind of detail that explains everything about why their music sounds like it came from somewhere outside of normal time. Their 2024 album ‘A Thrilling Romance’ is what it sounds like, a whole damn love story told in sound worlds, and their live shows have a theatrical pop attitude that people apparently cannot stop talking about. Massive drops and Monti’s voice doing shit that has no right to sound that good, this is a duo that has figured out something the rest of the pop world is still catching up to.
I still think about that bathroom mirror sometimes. The whole three months of flat, grey nothing, and then one DJ drop and my body just decided it was done. The decision happens before you know you’ve made it, and that is the whole damn point of this song. Beau Bowen built a track about the moment you find yourself in that mirror, and Monti sounds like she could get anyone’s ass off the floor to make it.
