Russ Harris, once a Billboard Dance Chart-charting producer and remixer, shifted his focus in 2020 toward Contemporary Christian music under the name Fishburn, and “Take It Away,” out July 3rd, is the third chapter of his upcoming concept album Bukra, following “The Flame” and “The Baker Woman.” Written and produced by Harris with vocals from Emy Smith, the song is built explicitly as a prayer, addressed to anyone carrying grief, anxiety, loneliness, or spiritual exhaustion.
What makes “Take It Away” land is how directly it sits with the weight it’s describing before offering anything resembling relief. It opens with the admission of screaming on the inside, and that kind of unguarded honesty about internal struggle isn’t always a given in worship-adjacent pop, which can lean toward reassurance before it earns it. Here, the song stays with the darkness long enough to make the eventual turn toward surrender feel like something actually wrestled with rather than assumed.
Surrender is the track’s entire architecture, and it works on two levels at once. Musically, the chorus’s repeated plea gives way to a quieter, settled resolution, a shift from pleading to acceptance built right into the song’s structure. Spiritually, that same arc mirrors what surrender means within the faith the song is rooted in: not passivity, but the act of handing over what a person can no longer carry alone. The two reinforce each other, the musical release and the spiritual one arriving in the same breath, which is what gives the song its emotional charge rather than making it feel like a lyrical statement layered over a generic pop structure.
That structure also mirrors the album’s larger arc. Bukra moves from searching for light, to discovering where that light comes from, to this song’s act of finally releasing the burden altogether, and “Take It Away” plays as the emotional hinge of that progression rather than a standalone moment. For listeners navigating their own grief or exhaustion, faith-based or not, the song’s core message- that surrender is a form of strength rather than defeat- is built to land regardless of where someone is in that process.
“Take It Away” doesn’t rush its own comfort. It earns the hope at its center by sitting honestly with the weight that comes before it, and that patience is what gives the song its resonance.