NEEB Stand Still While the Market Moves on You Are Not Alone

NEEB have been moving through British groove music for a long time, longer than the current quartet shape would suggest. The Hartlepool group began in 1999 as a trio built around Mark Hand on Rhodes, keys and synths, Tony Waite on bass and production, and Mark Lloyd on drums. They came up through electronica, breaks, house and jazz-informed rhythm, shared bills with James, The Magic Numbers and Alabama 3, and played rooms and fields that included Glastonbury and Solfest. What changed the temperature was Jasmine Weatherill joining in 2023. Her voice pulled the project into songs. The debut album Take To The Sky, released in October 2025 on Hartlepool’s Shy Bairn Records and recorded at the band’s Mobeus Studio, made that shift public. Warm keys, patient drums, bass with weight, a vocal that could sit inside the arrangement without asking to dominate it.

Feeling Tonight, the first single from the forthcoming second album YANA, pushed that sound toward brighter disco-soul and picked up support from BBC Introducing and Amazing Radio. You Are Not Alone, out today, turns the lights down. It is the second marker on the road to an album due in February 2027, and it shows another register in the same band. Less sparkle on the surface. More air in the middle of the room.

There is an old photographer’s trick that keeps returning whenever cities try to explain themselves. Leave the shutter open on a crowded street and people stop being people. They become streaks. Stalls hold their shape. Stone holds its shape. Bodies smear into weather. The Sunday market at Newcastle Quayside, where NEEB filmed the clip for this single, is built for that kind of picture. Bags, tents, trainers, the small commerce of a late morning. The band stand still while the market keeps moving around them. The artwork is taken from the same shoot. At first the image looks like a location credit. Then the song starts, and the still figures begin to feel like the point.

You Are Not Alone opens on Latin-tinged percussion, a flicker of movement at the edge of the frame, then settles into a spacious, laid-back groove. Piano and Rhodes make the bed. Waite’s bass stays round and close to the ground. Lloyd’s drums keep a soft, slightly late pulse, the kind that asks the neck to move before the feet do. Weatherill does not throw the title at the listener. She places it, then places it again. “You are not alone / Even when your world comes crashing down around you.” The language is plain on purpose. No twist in the last line. No reveal waiting behind the chorus. The writing trusts repetition the way a hand on a shoulder trusts contact.

That is where the market photograph stops being decoration. A Sunday crowd is full of people who will never speak to each other. You can stand in the middle of it and feel sealed off, or you can feel held by the simple fact of other bodies occupying the same ground. NEEB write from the second version. The track does not rush to lift anyone out of the wreckage named in the lyric. It stays in the wreckage long enough to keep time with it. The production leaves space around Weatherill’s vocal, delay and reverb loosening the edges so the voice behaves like another texture in the room. The refrain becomes a low light rather than a banner.

What gives the single its control is the pacing. After the brighter colour of Feeling Tonight, this cut shows how much of NEEB’s identity lives in restraint. The jazz-soul harmony is still there in the chords. The North East groove is still there in the pocket. The arrangement just refuses to fill every gap. Hand’s keys glow instead of decorating. The percussion keeps a faint outdoor heat, as if the market never quite leaves the mix. Across four minutes the song builds temperature without raising its voice. By the time “around you” starts to circle on its own, the lyric has become physical. The world can come apart at the edges. The groove does not.

YANA already has a title that tells you where the band want this chapter to sit. You Are Not Alone is the phrase written out in full, and it is also a method. NEEB have spent years learning how to hold a room with feel rather than force. Here that knowledge turns outward, toward anyone listening at the point when things start to fall apart. The single earns its weight by staying still inside the blur. The market keeps moving. The band keep their place. The line keeps arriving until it sounds like company.

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You Are Not Alone is out now via Shy Bairn Records.

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