Thomas And The Angry Hearts Release Open Your Eyes for Listeners Still Awake After Midnight
A Lillestrøm Folk-Rock Single for Anyone Who Stays up Late to Keep the Quiet
Open Your Eyes came out on 16 October 2026 through Southbound Records, and it is written for the hours most people sleep through. Thomas And The Angry Hearts are a five-piece folk-rock band from Lillestrøm, just outside Oslo. Their new single is about staying up late to hold on to a rare calm before morning brings the day back.
Thomas And The Angry Hearts have Open Your Eyes in the playlist below, and the band’s full run of coverage is on the Thomas And The Angry Hearts profile. The single came to this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news desks. Give it a listen first, then read on for the people it was written for.
The single runs three minutes and 22 seconds. Its subject is small and familiar. The world finally goes quiet, and everything feels right for a while. Yet the sunrise is already on its way to end it. So the audience is easy to name: the person still awake after the rest of the house has gone to bed.
Thomas And The Angry Hearts Wrote Open Your Eyes for Night Owls and Folk-Rock Listeners Alike
The night owl comes first. The song sits in the pull between two wishes. One is to keep the stillness a little longer. The other is to let it go, because the day will arrive anyway. That tension gives the song its bittersweet colour.
The second listener already knows the band. Thomas And The Angry Hearts mix Americana and Irish folk into rock songs with pop-sized choruses. The band says it makes music for people who carry both love and regret. Their self-titled album introduced that blend in 2025, and for anyone who found them there, Open Your Eyes is the next step.
The third listener keeps a shelf of records for that late hour, and two belong next to this one. Fleetwood Mac often ended their concerts with Songbird, which Christine McVie, the band’s keyboard player, wrote and sang. McVie recorded it at the piano on the empty stage of the Zellerbach Auditorium at Berkeley in March 1976, and the session ran into the next morning. Thomas And The Angry Hearts made a similar choice when they played the new song live in December 2025. The lead went to Hilde Bergersen Ådland, their own keyboard player.
Cowboy Junkies are the other. They made The Trinity Session in one day in November 1987, gathered around a single microphone in a Toronto church. Margo Timmins sang through a PA system that another group had left behind. Nearly four decades on, it still sounds best after midnight, the same hour this single was written for.
The Five Players and Two Producers Behind Open Your Eyes
Thomas Warhuus Ådland wrote the words, and wrote the music together with Truls Fjeldvang. In the band, Thomas sings and plays guitar, while Hilde Bergersen Ådland, the second voice, also plays melodica. Nils Stian Aasheim adds guitar and mandolin. Stig Terje Inderberg and Leiv-Rune Gully complete the line-up on bass and drums. For the recording, the band went back to Ronni Le Tekrø, one of Norway’s best-known rock guitarists, who had also produced their album. Le Tekrø shares the production credit on the single with Kjartan Hesthagen.
The Early Response to Open Your Eyes Began in a Lillestrøm Bar Before the Song Was Released
The first audience heard the song more than ten months before release. On 5 December 2025, the band played a hometown show at Martin’s Bar in Lillestrøm, with three new songs in the set. Open Your Eyes was one of them. A guest violinist, Amelie Lied Haga, played under the vocal line, and the piano brought the song to a soft close. Most of the set ran loud. This song did not, and the room went quiet to listen.
By then, the new songs were already recorded. The band had played them for Ronni Le Tekrø at the producer’s own studio, a house among the trees, and recorded What Went Wrong first. Amelie Lied Haga joined the session on its second day. Le Tekrø’s stated aim was a fuller folk sound in the spirit of Phil Spector, with every part serving the song. Americana UK was in the room, and its report from that session ran in February 2026.
Readers outside Norway had found the band before this single, too. The Cage Magazine reviewed Perfect Rules in January 2025. A month later, Brazil’s Os Garotos de Liverpool wrote about It’s You in Portuguese. Both songs came from the album that set the stage for this one.
The Community Around Thomas And The Angry Hearts
Lillestrøm is a football town, and the band plays as part of it. At that December show, the local club had a cup final the following day, so the band finished the night in the club’s shirts. Plenty of the crowd knew the older songs word for word.
The band also keeps its own door open. Its website invites listeners to join its community and takes bookings directly, with a joke about the fee. Southbound Records, an independent Norwegian label, released the single.
Start with Open Your Eyes late, with the lights low. Then go back to What Went Wrong, the first song the band recorded with Le Tekrø on that visit.
IndieMusic.News’s curator team: “Songs about the small hours often ask for sympathy. Open Your Eyes asks only for a few more minutes of quiet before the day starts, and that restraint is what keeps us coming back to it.”
Follow Thomas And The Angry Hearts on Spotify, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and the band’s YouTube channel. The single is also on Apple Music, Deezer and Tidal.
