From Dutch label, Construction Records, March saw the third album from For All We Know, the project of Ruud Jolie, guitarist of the great Dutch metal outfit, Within Temptation. The album was entitled By Design Or By Disaster.

It is an extremely good album, and I have chosen All We Did Was Hide from it as my “ballad of 2024”.

To quote from my review:

All We Did Was Hide has a lovely acoustic guitar and gentle vocal to begin, and as the track develops, there is such a deep sense of melancholy to it, a retrospective song with the urge to move on and, I feel, forget about the self. It is simply beautiful, and the emotion builds as it moves forward, with the guitar solo leading the collective into a wall of sound before the close returns to the start. Thus far, the rock ballad of the year for me.