Young love can make gravity feel optional, and Laurel lets ‘French Kiss’ float right into that dangerous little high. Written and recorded entirely at her home in Los Angeles, the track was also produced by Laurel herself. The downtempo alt-pop track opens a new era built around British nostalgia and hazy romantic fantasy. The mood stays dreamy while something darker hums underneath, giving all that sun-struck devotion a memory of how fucking low love can take you too. As the lead single from her forthcoming album, ‘French Kiss’ feels like Laurel walking into a new world with somebody’s mouth still on hers and absolutely no interest in coming back down.
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She establishes the fantasy immediately with “Sun struck / Blue water / French kiss / Take me out on the town” before pushing it into “Blood red / Wild summer / True bliss / No I won’t let you down.” Those little flashes feel like snapshots from a romance that has already convinced both people they are invincible. The colors get richer as the desire does, and Laurel keeps the language spare enough that your imagination gets to fill in the skin between them.
Then the song gets wonderfully physical. “You’re holding me inside your arms / I’m kissing you back in the sun / Laying my hand on your chest / I wanna be better than the best.” That hand on his chest does a lot of work. She can feel the person she loves underneath her palm while simultaneously making this enormous promise about how completely she wants to love him. The intimacy feels soft as hell, though the ambition inside it is huge.
By the chorus, Laurel has basically decided ordinary romantic expectations can fuck off. “At loving you ain’t nothing / But the gods can stop me now / We’re heaven bound / Honey no there’s nothing / But the gods can stop us now / We’re heaven bound.” She takes the rush of being in love and sends it somewhere celestial, which makes the later imagery of “Red wine / Soft thunder” and “Deep eyes / Lavender / White dress / I’ll marry you in the south” feel almost inevitable. One kiss has apparently escalated into wine and a wedding dress. Divine intervention is apparently next. Young love has always been a little dramatic. Thank heaven for that.
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Laurel Arnell-Cullen grew up near Southampton in a house where music was already part of the furniture but she found her own lane as a teenager after discovering Laura Marling and teaching herself guitar. By her mid-teens she was writing songs and playing local shows then spent time studying in Portsmouth before an early demo started pulling industry attention toward London. What followed was years of figuring out how much of the process she wanted to own herself, and the answer turned out to be pretty much all of it. Her self-produced debut album DOGVIOLET arrived in 2018, with PETROL BLOOM and LIMBO CHERRY pushing her toward brighter synth-pop before 2024’s PALPITATIONS opened that sound even wider. So a track like ‘French Kiss’, written and produced alone at home in Los Angeles, feels less like a reinvention than Laurel doing what she has always done best: trusting her own damn instincts and building the world herself.
‘French Kiss’ leaves Laurel somewhere between blue water and heaven, fully convinced the person beside her is worth the altitude. Maybe that certainty lasts forever and maybe summer eventually burns itself out. Right now his arms are around her and her hand is on his chest. The fucking view from up there sounds gorgeous.
