Wings of Desire – This Is The Life

Chloe Little and James Taylor are twelve months into an ambitious project: one single per new moon through 2026, culminating in a full album on December 9th. “This Is The Life” is the latest instalment, and it lands squarely in the post-punk / new wave territory the duo have been refining since their 2023 album Life Is Infinite.

We covered the opening chapter of this project back in W04 with “Whisper” — a patient, space-focused track that set the tone for what was coming. “This Is The Life” pushes harder. The guitar riffs are wider, the vocals more open, and the production retains the analog warmth of their earlier work while reaching for something bigger. It sounds like a band that’s been playing live rooms and absorbing that energy — which tracks, given they’ve spent time supporting Editors, Nation of Language and Bleach Lab, and played The Roundhouse alongside The Cribs.

Lyrically it’s doing something interesting. The song questions the “live in the moment” cliché rather than endorsing it — pointing at the exhaustion behind the advice, the loneliness underneath the hustle, before opening out into something more genuinely hopeful. I love how the arrangement mirrors that arc: the verses are hemmed in, almost claustrophobic, and the chorus actually earns its lift rather than just asserting it.

Wings of Desire describe their work as conscious living set to music, drawing from psychological revolution, visual arts and 20th century counterculture — a Factory-era creative outlet, in their words, for a disenfranchised generation. Whether or not you buy the manifesto, the songs are making good on it.