There’s a brilliance that comes when you wield an acoustic guitar as a song’s essential foundation. With his new song “Heaven Made the Darkness,” Ruston Kelly begins with only an acoustic guitar before a dusty smattering of cosmic sounds enters the mix, casting the entire song as some sort of deep-sleep reverie. It’s hope wrapped up in three minutes of musical bliss.

“And maybe all of this suffering is meant to show you what it’s all really worth,” he sings, as the guitar begins to distort. “So when you gotta get back up again / Just remember you got through all the worst.” Before long, Kelly’s voice floats into the ether, alongside equally spacey background vocals and an arrangement that adheres to neither here nor there. It just exists in the space between heartbeats, the emptiness between each star’s glow, and the sigh between each breath.

“I’ve found that hope can appear in what would seemingly be unlikely places, but if you look closer you can see it’s not unlikely at all. The little things, the simple things, the things I can daily take for granted are what I’ve found to be the largest and most luminescent sources of hope,” Kelly says in a statement. “Just knowing someone loves you contains enough goodness to completely revitalize a worn-down spirit. You just have to be present to remember that. And at the end of it, pain will always be dwarfed by love.”

Listen to “Heaven Made the Darkness” below.

“Heaven Made the Darkness” is a leftover from sessions around Kelly’s most recent set, The Weakness, released earlier this year. A forthcoming project will feature acoustic versions of previously released songs, bonus tracks, and demos, among other treats.