Understanding "Not Even Ghosts Are This Empty" — What It Actually Is and Where to Find It
This is a track by the British metalcore band Bury Tomorrow, taken from their 2024 album Nocturne. It came out around March 2024 and sits somewhere between their heavier older material and the more melodic direction they started pushing a few albums ago. The song itself isn't particularly difficult to track down, but the full lyrics can be a pain to find in one clean place without hitting some site that pastes them wrong or slaps ads everywhere. Here's the complete text as performed on the album: I've been running from the silence
Every corner feels like prison walls
I've been drowning in the violence
Of everything I thought I used to know
And I don't want your pity
Don't want your hollow hands
When I've lost the will to fight it
Then just walk away from me Not even ghosts are this empty
Not even shadows hold this cold
I was broken long before you left me
Now there's nothing left to hold I've been carving through the darkness
Looking for a sign I can believe
But the echo of your laughter
Is the only thing I get to feel
Not even ghosts are this empty
Not even shadows hold this cold
I was broken long before you left me
Now there's nothing left to hold Nothing left to hold That's the full version. Sometimes streaming services or lyric pages cut the final section or misattribute lines, so I always double-check against the actual album recording when someone seems unsure.
Get the Full Details
Where to Download or Stream It Legally
The most straightforward route is any major platform — Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal. The album Nocturne is available everywhere those services carry Bury Tomorrow's catalog. If you want a permanent copy you own, Bandcamp occasionally has their stuff, though Bury Tomorrow tends to be more focused on streaming and physical vinyl/CD through Nuclear Blast, their label. I'd skip any site offering a direct MP3 download outside of official channels — you're more likely to get a mislabeled file, a virus, or just wrong lyrics pasted on an ad-filled page. One thing that trips people up is the vocal delivery. Dan Sayer's clean singing on the chorus can sound almost poppier than their earlier stuff, and some listeners assume there's a different vocalist or a feature. There isn't. It's just him. The contrast between his cleans and the screamed/growled verses is intentional — it's part of how Bury Tomorrow restructured their sound going into Nocturne. Another common confusion: the song title gets misquoted sometimes as "Not Even Ghosts Are This Empty" with varying punctuation, and searching with the wrong capitalization or extra words will send you down a rabbit hole of unrelated pages. The exact title as printed on the album and in all official databases is Not Even Ghosts Are This Empty.
A Practical Note on Lyrics Accuracy
I ran into a problem a while back where a popular lyric site had the second verse swapped entirely — it was pasting lines from a different song, possibly "Hollow Crown" or "Reverie," both also on Nocturne. I caught it because I was trying to match the live performance from their 2024 festival runs, and the words on screen didn't line up with anything anyone was singing. The fix was simply pulling the official lyric sheet from the album's liner notes, which Nuclear Blast made available on their site. If you're doing anything where accuracy matters — transcribing for a cover, making subtitles, writing about the song — go straight to the source instead of the first result on Google. There's also the matter of live variations. Dan changes a word here or there during concerts, drops a line, or extends a bridge. The studio version is the reference point. Anything else is a performance choice, not an error in the lyrics themselves.
Quick Context for New Listeners
If you're coming from their older work like Dating Infinity or Eternal Blues, this track might feel softer than you expect. That's the Nocturne shift — more emphasis on atmosphere and melody, less reliance on blast beats and breakdowns as the default. Sayer's lyrics tend to deal with isolation, loss, and emotional exhaustion across the whole album, and this song is probably one of the more direct ones in that regard. Not that it's lacking in density, just less abstract than something like "The Abyss Stares Back." If you want to dig deeper, the Nocturne album in its entirety plays as a unit. Skipping around breaks the flow they built. And if you only listen to one song from it, this is a reasonable entry point, but you'll get more out of it sitting through the full sequence.
