On her solo debut, the L.A.-based singer and songwriter taps members of the War on Drugs and Warpaint for winning songs about finding delight in despair.
Jess Cornelius prefers to remain in motion. Born and raised in New Zealand, the singer decamped to Australia in her late teens, launching the promising Melbourne rock band Teeth & Tongue several years later. Across four albums, Teeth & Tongue pivoted constantly, from snarling Bad Seeds blues to the velvet-gloved rock of Feist to synth-pop so cloying it seemed like a last cynical bid on careerism. After a decade stuck at the precipice of a breakthrough, Cornelius stepped away from Teeth & Tongue in 2017 to record five solo songs, all spare electric strums and soaring vibrato. That EP, Nothing Is Lost, felt at last like Cornelius’ real breakthrough—arching psalms of sadness and disappointment, rendered with the quiver and clarity of Angel Olsen. Her debut LP, the arresting Distance, suggests it was not another phase.
Cornelius left Australia in 2018 for Los Angeles, where she began recording Distance in a series of studios with session bands that included members of the War on Drugs, Warpaint, and Woods. She brought her restlessness with her, and it animates these 10 songs, from the way she treats musical inspirations and reference points like quick trysts to her lyrical disinterest in monogamy or the mores of adulthood. In recent years, the tension between being a footloose touring musician and the social pressure to grow up compelled Cornelius to grapple with age and expectation. On Distance, she details difficult situations—miscarriages, breakups, affairs, pep talks for one—with tragicomic candor, looking less for sympathy than a way to work through the mess. “You’re lonely,” she sings at one point. “Oh, but ain’t you livin’?”
Slipping in and out of musical guises with preternatural ease, Cornelius remains a chameleonic bandleader, as she was with Teeth & Tongue. She jabs back at some selfish prick with the punchy garage-rock of “Banging My Head” and floats through a languid R&B haze for “Easy for No One,” an ode to not finding some great meaning or purpose in growing up. The muted doo-wop of “Palm Trees” moves on a similar California breeze as Best Coast, a mode tailormade for Cornelius’ questions about what a new state of residence may do for her state of mind.
Much of Distance hinges on some version of a rock band—even “Love and Low Self Esteem,” a barbed codependence critique that served as the centerpiece of Cornelius’ EP, gets fitted with walloping drums and howling organs. But Distance’s quiet, spare outlier is one of its most stunning moments. A duet for her wistful nylon-stringed guitar and Mary Lattimore’s pensive harp, “Born Again” conjures the candlelit majesty of Marissa Nadler or even Sandy Denny. Cornelius’ bracing voice suddenly sounds ancient and fading, rendering snapshots of her youth against a backdrop of feeling tired and worn by time. “One of these days, I’m going to be born again,” she briefly taunts, as though ready to maraud in search of lost youth.
For the most part, though, Cornelius handles heaviness with an enviable lightness, finding new resiliency in every rebound. She’s funny, self-effacing, and honest, wry enough to half-apologize for any trouble she’s caused by having an affair while also hoping it resumes soon. Even “Body Memory,” where she mentions a miscarriage and surveys the damage it did to her relationship and sense of self, somehow feels ebullient. Harmonies lift her above each hurdle. Cornelius’ credo during all this is the brilliant “No Difference,” an anthem for finding happiness on whatever terms and in whatever way you deem reasonable. It’s the kind of song you might sing to yourself after any hard day.
A curious thing happened to Cornelius in California before she could finish Distance: She met someone and, in late June, had a baby, Tui, exactly a month before releasing the record. She sighs at the very thought of having children during “Easy for No One,” as if it’s a possibility that’s simply passed her by. But in the jubilant music video for “Kitchen Floor,” a song about bailing on another one-night stand, she dances across the stars on Hollywood Boulevard in last night’s leopard-print dress while also very pregnant. That’s the delight of remaining in motion: You never know exactly what you’re going to find.
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