🔗 Share this article

Within this track "Miss America", listeners are placed inside a lodging near JFK airfield, as Jennifer Walton receives a devastating news that her dad has illness discovery. The UK-raised artist was traveling America for the first time, drumming alongside group Kero Kero Bonito, and abruptly grief takes over, tinging all with melancholy. Unsteady piano and hushed strings accompany dark dispatches from the road: "Rural scenes and crumbling homes / Shopping centers, illicit trades, anxious moments."

Walton's soft vocals come across with a deadpan manner, yet this album's intensity arises from her keen penmanship—mixing stories, folksy sayings, and blunt personal notes—coupled with surprising maximalism. Not many tracks this year possess more potent novelistic flair compared to "Shelly", a piece that depicts the killing of a deer and spirals toward a petrol-laden confrontation, evoking written works illuminated with glimpses of distorted strings. Anxious, subdued verses with echoing, plucked strings transition into expansive refrains, and Walton's vocals digitally manipulated to become something omniscient and menacing.

Listeners may already know Walton from her work as a music creator, DJ, and member to bands such as Caroline. The album's musical twists reflect her diverse career. The opener "Sometimes" bursts with fanfare, as if a string band taken unawares, while "Born Again Backwards" drastically ups the tempo with an intense, stunning, repeating drum fill. Dense layers of audio, expertly mixed by a long-term partner, seem at once gnarly and ethereal, while Walton's morbid, enchanted thoughts culminate on standout "Lambs", which briefly becomes a twirling dance. "May your life never end in death," she bargains, with heart-aching dark comedy.