There's something about 3 a.m. thoughts that hit differently. That's the headspace Midwest artist Air Mail channels on "Wide Awake (a.m.)," the second single from his Unearth series. It's the kind of song that catches you scrolling through bad news at ungodly hours, unable to look away.

Niko Francis, the artist behind Air Mail, named himself after the handwritten letters he used to send home. That detail matters because his music carries the same quality as those letters, something deeply personal that's traveled a long distance. His lo-fi approach feels deliberately rough around the edges, with vocals that sound like they're coming from another room and acoustic guitars drenched in the kind of nostalgia that aches a little.

"Wide Awake (a.m.)" builds itself around one repeated line that functions less like a hook and more like the thing your brain won't stop saying at 2, 3, 4 in the morning. "Because we, we are wide awake" loops through the track, and Francis wrote it after doing exactly what most of us do when we can't sleep. He read the news coming out of Gaza, watched coverage of the LA wildfires, and couldn't shake the feeling of watching everything familiar collapse from a distance.

What makes the song work is how it doesn't try to resolve that tension. The melody has this hopeful lift to it, but the lyrics circle back on themselves in a way that feels uncomfortably accurate. It's not protest music and it's not quite a lullaby either. It's closer to the internal monologue of someone who desperately wants rest but can't stop thinking long enough to find it.

Francis isn't trying to make grand statements here. Instead, he's documenting that specific brand of modern exhaustion where you're hyper-aware of distant tragedies while feeling powerless to do anything about them. The song meditates on connectedness, how we're all wired into the same news cycle, watching the same disasters unfold in real time while sitting alone in our rooms.

There's no catharsis at the end of "Wide Awake (a.m.)," just the acknowledgment that sometimes being awake means bearing witness to things you'd rather not see. And maybe that's the point. Francis isn't offering solutions or silver linings. He's just naming the feeling, which is often the most honest thing art can do. You can find more of his work on Instagram, where he continues documenting these quiet, unsettled hours.