Lizzy McAlpine - Angel

Sep 17

Lizzy McAlpine has established herself throughout the 2020s as one of the most intriguing faces of the singer-songwriter sphere with her first three albums, especially 2024’s Older. Now, two years on from that LP, her skills are reaffirmed once again on her fourth LP, Angel, released September 18th via RCA. The fourteen-track LP sees McAlpine at her most hopeful, and at her most focused.

Instrumentally, the album mostly continues where Older left off, building on that album’s style here and there but largely remaining sonically quite consistent with it. The production is warm and airy throughout, giving the project a distinct atmosphere that wraps itself around the listener and allows the stories being told to feel more immediate and real. Fitting to the album’s title, some of the tracks’ soft, shimmering quality gives them a slightly otherworldly, almost divine feel. The instrumentals are composed excellently, with standouts including “A car wash and a new pair of pants”, “The moon” and “Mason’s song”, but the level staying high from start to finish. Vocally, Lizzy McAlpine mostly sticks to her trademark soft, understated style, though she does have some bigger, more outwardly powerful moments on tracks like “Peach”.

But the main value of this album lies in the writing. As mentioned previously, the topical matter of Angel stands out immediately. Lizzy McAlpine’s first three albums were largely fueled by heartbreak, falling out of love, and cycles of self-doubt and internal issues. While some of that is present on this album, however, there is also something new – a present theme of love, something much happier in its central spirit than the vast majority of her discography up to this point. The two narratives – one of a relationship declining and another of a new one blooming – intertwine throughout the tracklist in a really compelling way, making the album into something of an emotional rollercoaster.

The writing itself is very well-crafted too, mature and vivid as ever from Lizzy McAlpine consistently throughout the album. Her storytelling is seamless and gripping on both sides of the story, with both producing cutting lines – “You wanted the people to notice you, you wanted my name to be yours // But you hate that they’re all saying something now that you are not mine anymore” on “A car wash and a new pair of pants”, for example, or “There is no hand I could hold that would feel any better” on “I have a friend”. Songs like the opener and lead single, “The light in the painting”, and the Fleet Foxes-assisted “Soldier of the road”, are among the biggest highlights of the project from this standpoint.

The centerpiece of the album musically, though, is “Our strange ways”. The nearly seven-and-a-half-minute long track is a slow, measured culmination to the part of the album where Lizzy is in love; the beautifully constructed instrumental fizzles out just after the five-minute mark, only for the resulting silence to be broken by a painfully gentle piano outro that gives the track a significant extra amount of emotional impact. The heaviest song, on the other hand, is the penultimate track, “The crowd”. As the thirteenth track, it follows the tradition of previous songs occupying that spot on Lizzy’s tracklists in being dedicated to her late father. This one is probably her most poignant and crushing yet, with her wistfully listing the things she wished were present in her memory of her father and the time she got with him before his passing, culminating in the heartbreaking lines “Everything I do, I do so I can make you proud // Everything I do, I make it big, so you can hear the crowd” on the chorus.

Overall, Angel is an excellent body of work in all of its components. It shows off all her best qualities as an artist perfectly, as well as opening a new dimension for her music’s subject matter; it’s also wonderfully composed, arranged and produced. It’s a fantastic album, and another strong entry into Lizzy McAlpine’s extremely consistent discography.

8.3/10

MUSIC