It would have been easy for Leo Sawikin to write something straightforward with a title like ‘Burning Love’. A huge chorus. A declaration. Perhaps a little heartbreak around the edges. Instead, he gives us wolves.
He gives us sparrows crying into the night, distant constellations, strangled flowers, vast oceans and figures moving down dangerous roads. Love, in his hands, becomes less like a familiar pop-song subject and more like a landscape somebody is attempting to cross without a map.
His career has increasingly been defined by his willingness to find complexity inside accessible songwriting. His melodies invite listeners in quickly, but the ideas tend to reveal themselves more gradually. And ‘Burning Love’ continues that pattern while pushing the lyrical imagery into more symbolic territory than much of his previous work.
There’s also an appealing continuity between ‘Burning Love’ and the broader arc of his catalogue. ‘The Same Mistakes’ found its strength in recurrence and emotional recognition, while ‘Till You’re Somebody Else’ dealt with transformation and the uneasy distance that can emerge between versions of ourselves. This new single seems to ask a related question from another angle: what happens when love itself becomes so large that your own place inside it becomes difficult to understand?
Meanwhile, Phil Ek’s continued production involvement provides an encouraging indication of where the forthcoming 2027 album might head. Leo Sawikin’s material benefits from subtle detail, and Ek has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to create depth without crowding the songwriter at the centre.
That combination of emotional restraint and imaginative scale makes the track an intriguing opening move for his next chapter. Rather than simply writing another romantic single, Leo Sawikin has created something that feels closer to a meditation on what it means to be overwhelmed by another person, and whether surrendering to that feeling is an act of courage or something far more dangerous.