Summerhouse Make All I Know Feel Like a Room You Keep Walking Back Into

Conall Hill grew up in Hackney and spent his teens and early twenties in indie bands, playing the kind of North London pubs where the room is too hot and the PA is slightly wrong. Then the city went quiet. He started making songs in a basement, recording guitars and vocal chops on an iPhone, chasing tones that felt handmade rather than polished for a playlist. Summerhouse is that work given a name. All I Know, out now as an independent DistroKid release, is his first commercial single and the opening move of a four-song EP due on 11 September. The record is built with singer Angie Robba, appearing here as blackbird. Together they sketch a stranger, a situationship that will not stay finished, and the regret that sits under the good hours.

In English gardens the summerhouse is a small, slightly useless building. A folly. You do not live there. You walk across the lawn when the weather holds and sit as if the afternoon will last. The furniture is lighter than the furniture in the real house. The door is rarely locked. When the light drops you go back inside and pretend the visit was only a pause. The name of Hill’s project sits on that idea before a single note arrives. All I Know is a song about returning to a room that was never meant to be permanent.

The lyric knows the arrangement before the arrangement proves it. “Cause I know it’s a game, but I lost my head.” Then the pre-chorus, where thought tries to do the work of leaving and fails: “Can’t hold the weight of my heart now.” The chorus does not solve anything. It names the habit. “But I run to you again like it’s all I know.” Radio songs cut in like other people’s finished stories. In the second verse the loop gets plainer still. Same old story, different name. The flame is touched on purpose. The bridge is the coldest part of the writing, and the most precise. The bed empties. The sun comes up. The singer fades to grey. Dawn should reset the day. Here it only shows what the night was willing to hide.

Hill has said the EP will move through excitement, instability and regret. You hear that plan already in the pacing. Distorted guitars and drums crowd the darker passages. Synths tighten, vocals fill out, and for a moment the track sounds like resolve. Then the psychedelic guitars lift the temperature again, a drunken summer relapse, before the ending lets the air go stale. The fade is unresolved on purpose. Peace and early Bombay Bicycle Club sit in the guitar language. Magdalena Bay sits in the coloured, synthetic lift. Cannons sit somewhere in the gloss that appears when the chorus opens. The contrast is the point. Hope and omen use the same instruments. Context decides which one you are in.

Robba’s presence matters more than a featured-artist credit usually does. Born in Lyon to a family of Italian circus artists, she signed young with Playtwo, passed through The Voice France, and has spent the years since writing and singing across pop and electronic records. blackbird is the name she uses when the voice needs to feel like a second self. It also happens to be the bird that starts at first light in British gardens, the hour this song treats as the worst one. Her vocal sits airy and close at first, then stacks into those open “oh oh” figures that give the chorus its lift. She does not decorate the confession. She carries it.

What gives All I Know its weight is control rather than scale. The production leaves space, then spends it. The writing is blunt about self-sabotage without asking for sympathy. Hill is not presenting a finished world. He is presenting the first room of one, built from basement recordings and a collaborator who knows how to make a hook feel like a bruise. If the EP keeps this temperature, Summerhouse will be a project about people who understand the pattern and still choose the walk across the lawn.

The single ends the way the affair does. Nothing is closed. The room is still there.