Garrett Anthony Rice continues to build anticipation for his ambitious double album Equinox with the release of “The Prisoner,” a slow-burning, psychologically charged single that feels both steeped in rock lineage and quietly subversive. Rather than chasing immediacy, Rice opts for patience, atmosphere, and narrative control, and the result is one of his most compelling releases to date.
Subtly nodding to Gimme Shelter, “The Prisoner” carries a tense, coiled undercurrent from its opening bars. The verses are tight and monochrome, delivered with restrained, almost measured breaths, as though the narrator is carefully rationing truth. Rice inhabits the role of a storyteller recounting a crime, or perhaps imagining one, allowing the lines to hover in the negative space between confession and fabrication. The tension isn’t just in the lyrics; it lives in the pauses.
When the chorus arrives, the arrangement expands, widening into something more melodic and emotionally exposed. It’s a classic rock dynamic shift, the guarded exterior cracking open before instinctively retreating again. Listeners raised on the narrative arcs of the great rock auteurs will recognise the move: build the mask, lift it briefly, then snap it back into place.
The most striking moment comes in the outro. “I must confess I made this up,” Rice sings, destabilising everything that came before it. The twist lands with an unsettling wink reminiscent of the self-referential closing moments of Ashes to Ashes, where myth and memory collapse into artifice. Rice even threads in a faint backing line that echoes Bowie’s “Do you remember a guy that has been…,” not as imitation but as acknowledgement, a quiet dialogue with the canon rather than a costume party in its honour.
That distinction is key. “The Prisoner” doesn’t feel retro or revivalist. Rice treats influence as something to metabolise rather than mimic. There’s danger in the restraint, humanity in the ambiguity. It recalls a time when rock mythology carried both shadow and sincerity, yet it never feels trapped in it.
Hailing from County Dublin and now based in Greystones, Rice approaches Equinox, an 18-track double album, with clear ambition. Having previously released under the alias (i) CONSULT and drawn the attention of producer Chris Potter, he’s positioning this project as a statement of depth and craft over trend-chasing.
If “The Prisoner” is any indication, Equinox won’t be about spectacle. It will be about tension, narrative sleight of hand, and the careful architecture of influence. Rice isn’t rewriting the rulebook, he’s studying it, bending it, and quietly reminding listeners why it mattered in the first place.
