There is a moment on ‘Before It Snows’ when Rosina Buck’s songwriting feels less like performance and more like excavation. Across six tracks, the Bristol-based artist digs through the tangled roots of love addiction, heartbreak, co-dependency and recovery, emerging with a debut EP that is as emotionally bruised as it is hopeful.
The first instalment of a planned two-part collection, ‘Before It Snows’ finds Buck operating within a broadly folk-informed framework while consistently pushing against its boundaries. These songs may begin with singer-songwriter intimacy, but they rarely stay there. Instead, Buck and producer Mike Trim approach each track with an instinctive sense of curiosity, allowing arrangements to evolve into playful, unpredictable shapes rather than neat, polished constructions. That spontaneity is one of the record’s greatest strengths.
Buck has described the recording process as “playful and raw”, and that spirit is audible throughout. Rather than sanding down rough edges, ‘Before It Snows’ embraces them. The result is a collection that feels alive and unguarded, driven more by emotional truth than technical perfection.
The EP opens with ‘Telescope Love’, a song that immediately establishes Buck’s gift for transforming personal experience into vivid, almost mythical imagery. Elsewhere, ‘Vampire’ provides one of the collection’s most unexpected turns. Described by Buck as “Transylvanian folk funk”, the track injects theatrical energy and rhythmic momentum into the record while retaining the darker emotional undercurrents that run throughout it. The song’s playful exterior masks themes of dysfunctional relationships and emotional depletion, embodying the tension that gives the EP much of its character.
At the heart of the record sits the title track, a devastating centrepiece that captures the moment before a final letting go. Written about a relationship formed during rehabilitation, ‘Before It Snows’ serves as both emotional climax and narrative turning point. It is here that the EP’s wider themes crystallise: the painful recognition that salvation cannot arrive from another person, and the difficult process of learning to provide it for yourself.
What elevates ‘Before It Snows’ beyond confessional songwriting is Buck’s willingness to interrogate recurring patterns rather than isolated heartbreaks. Throughout the EP, she explores limerence, trauma bonding, betrayal and self-destructive cycles with striking honesty, examining not just what happened but why she kept returning to the same emotional terrain. The songs were largely shaped during early sobriety and lockdown, a period Buck has spoken about as one of profound personal transformation, and that sense of self-reconstruction permeates the entire record. Yet despite its heavy subject matter, ‘Before It Snows’ is rarely bleak. There is colour and humour woven through the darkness. Buck’s fondness for the surreal and unexpected prevents the record from becoming weighed down by its own introspection. Even at its most vulnerable, the EP retains a sense of wonder, reflecting an artist who has learned to look at painful experiences from new angles.
As a first chapter, ‘Before It Snows’ feels remarkably complete while still leaving space for what comes next. It documents a period of profound upheaval, but more importantly, it captures the beginnings of healing. Buck doesn’t present recovery as a neat conclusion; instead, she reveals it as an ongoing process, full of setbacks, revelations and small acts of courage.
For a debut EP, it is an impressively assured statement; emotionally fearless, sonically adventurous and rich with the kind of hard-earned insight that can only come from lived experience. If ‘Before It Snows’ charts the storm, its forthcoming companion piece may well reveal what comes after the thaw.