SAMLOW releases '3 Minutes Away'

Blue is the colour SAMLOW gave to absence. It is a precise choice. He is pointing at the particular ache of someone not being where you are, which is a different thing from sorrow or solitude. That blue belongs to 3 Minutes Away, his new single, released on 23 October 2026, and you meet it before you hear a word, on a cover he designed himself.

Step back and the blue turns out to be the last of a set. Across his singles, a quiet inspiration from Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy has taken shape. Magazine, his debut, was white, the colour he chose for its unbalanced obsession. Red Riot came next and took red, for the spirit of standing together. Each sleeve reflects the colour and mood of the song it carries, so the whole run hangs together as something you can see as well as hear, a small gallery of moods laid out in order.

I find that genuinely appealing in an emerging artist. Working in singles can make a body of work feel like a series of separate introductions. SAMLOW has instead given his listeners a reason to keep the earlier songs in mind when the new one arrives, and a reason to look at the covers side by side. It makes the third single feel like a chapter that completes something rather than a fresh start.

The first two chapters found their audience quickly. Magazine and Red Riot gathered nearly 50,000 Spotify streams within weeks of release, a striking figure for an artist only just stepping out under his own name. Duran Duran gave him a shout-out, and so did Anna Ross. Italy’s RAI 3 featured him. CLASH and iGuitar covered the songs too. That is the ground 3 Minutes Away stands on, and it suits a song so concerned with arriving somewhere.

Because the blue really does run through the lyric. The song opens in the hollowed hours, with the singer in a supermarket after “All the party people, have long departed”, which fits the night it came from, written while he waited for an Uber in a Tesco car park in Addlestone after a gig. He described the place in his own words: “The place felt lonely, all the crowds had gone, and home felt like the only place I wanted to be.” The absence here is specific and ordinary, which is exactly why it lands. Nobody has gone forever. Somebody is simply elsewhere, and the gap between here and there has grown larger than the map says it should.

What keeps it from sinking into gloom is the promise threaded through the chorus, the sense of a short distance being closed in real time: “By the time this song, on the radio is done…I’ll be there”. It is a lovely conceit, the song measuring itself against the journey, and there is a sweet foolishness in the second verse too, with “I spent all my money, on a vending machine, trying to find the honey, that she gives to me”. Absence makes people do daft, tender things, and he lets that show.

The bridge is where the trilogy idea pays off most for me. “And I’m hoping that you’re singing me home, Like you used to,” he writes, and then lets the hope turn into an admission: “And I know now I can’t make it on my own, like I used to”. Set that beside Red Riot’s spirit of standing together and the colours start talking to each other. Red was about people side by side. Blue is what you learn when they are not, the realisation, in his words, “that some journeys simply can’t be made alone”. The obsession of white, the solidarity of red and the absence of blue begin to read less like three themes and more like a single person working something out across a year.

There is a modesty in how he frames it, too. The heart in this song “Is no longer made of stone. Like it used to”, and he does not dress that up as triumph. It reads as someone softening, somewhat surprised to find himself doing so, and willing to say it plainly in the middle of an Indie / Alt Rock single built to be sung back.

By the final section the lyric has stripped itself down to a single line, “I’m three, three, three minutes away”, repeated until the distance almost seems to shrink with each pass. It never quite says he gets there. The song ends still on the road, still blue, which feels right for a colour he chose to stand for the space between people, and for a trilogy that closes on the hope of being met rather than the certainty of it.

PR: Decent Music PR

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