Grief can be scary – and it’s never easy to handle. With his new song, titled “Wet Cement,” pop singer-songwriter gnash offers up quite a tearjerker. As he muses about dead friends and family, he inches toward being able to cope with it all. The grief rages around him, and he just tries to keep his feet firmly planted on the ground.

With piano accompaniment, and little else, gnash admits to even revisiting the neighborhood where he grew up. “Now and then, I drive by the places where we used to live,” he sings. “Remember when we put our hands in wet cement / I almost have the guts to ring the doorbell.”

His performance is subtle, but there’s power in the quiet. It’s far more impactful than a sweeping, arena-sized banger. He dresses the words with a suffocating heaviness that is almost too much to bear. “I miss you, yeah, I miss you  / All your bad jokes, all your issues,” he sighs in the chorus. “And I won’t ever know why you had to go / But I miss you and I wish you’d come back home…”

“wet cement,” written with John Mark Nelson, found its inspiration in a friend’s admission of their father’s cancer diagnosis. “I wrote this song as an exercise in pre-grieving,” says gnash in a press statement. “My parents are older, and I’ve lost friends and uncles and grandparents along the way, but never had the perfect song to say, ‘I miss you, come back home.’ This song is for everyone I’ve ever missed (and ever will).”  

Listen to “wet cement” below.

gnash has been making waves for going on seven years. Ever since his breakout hit with 2016’s global smash “i hate u, i love you,” he’s never slowed down and always made the music he’s wanted to make. His following is massive – to put it into perspective, he has more than five million monthly Spotify listeners. There are clear reasons listeners are drawn to him. He has a way of writing that sucks you into his world. It’s the specificity and way he writes that ultimately makes it universal.

“wet cement” is the follow-up to his latest record, 2023’s The Art of Letting Go.