The Aosta Valley is a small Italian region high in the Alps, and it is the sort of place where the mountains decide how near anything can be. A neighbour is a valley away. A city is something you drive towards for hours. SAMLOW, a project based in London, began there, a long way from London, and you can hear the journey in the song he has just put out.

The man behind it is Sam Gino. For more than a decade he was the touring bassist, out across Europe, the UK and the US, and to Australia on three separate tours. It is a particular kind of musical life. The bassist stands a little back, watches the drummer, keeps the floor steady so the person at the front can do whatever they need to do. You learn patience in that role. Gino chose to walk to the microphone and sing his own songs.

3 Minutes Away is his third single as SAMLOW, following Magazine and then Red Riot, which between them drew a shout-out from Duran Duran. He co-wrote it with Bnann Infadel, and Gareth Young produced it in Cornwall, at Cube Recording Studios. The cover is his own work.

What strikes me most is how the song sits between two ways of living. Where he grew up, distance is real and physical, made of rock and snow. London is the opposite: everyone a few stops or a short ride away. The song lives in that gap. “I’m only three, three, three minutes away,” he sings, and the line holds both places at once. On a bad night those minutes can feel like a whole valley. Elsewhere he times the journey by the radio, “By the time this song / on the radio is done…I’ll be there,” as if the length of a song were the only distance he trusts.

Listen to how he enters. The band has already locked into a tight groove, drums and bass and a chugging guitar pulling hard together, and then his voice arrives low, dry and slightly raspy, almost spoken. “It’s late night, I’m in the supermarket,” he begins, as if he were talking to himself under the strip lights rather than performing to anyone. There is no reach for the rafters here. It is the delivery of someone who spent years listening to singers from a few feet away and learned that the first lines land best when you let the listener lean in. A bassist’s instinct, I think: start in the pocket, earn the rest.

The Three Colours trilogy by Kieślowski runs quietly through these singles, and this one is blue, the colour of absence. You feel that most in the bridge. The voice changes there, pushing into a raspy chest voice over repeated phrases, and each return of “Like you used to” comes harder than the one before. Underneath him the band drops into a heavier half-time stomp, with long guitar chords held and a faint high synth swell sitting behind, and that slower ground gives the rasp room to grow until it is something close to a plea. He has described the song as being about “the honest realisation that some journeys simply can’t be made alone,” and the bridge is where that realisation stops being a thought and becomes a sound in his throat. It is the most exposed he gets on the single, and it is the moment I keep going back to.

3 Minutes Away is out now. New singles are due early next year, and there are London gigs lined up too.

Spotify | Instagram | TikTok | YouTube | Facebook | Website