After the heavy-hearted indie folk of her debut, the Bristol singer-songwriter returns with a scruffier, more far-ranging record about developing a self in your twenties.
There comes a time in a disenchanted young man’s life when, unbearably stifled by the bourgeois-ness of his bourgeois surroundings—the competitive schools, supportive parents, constant supply of refrigerated whole milk—he pours himself into the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Ask him to pass the salt, and instead you’ll receive a long-winded sermon on morality and eternal recurrence. “I get sick on second best/You get off to God is dead,” the Bristol singer Fenne Lily sings softly to one such sage on “I, Nietzsche,” nailing the dynamic of so many grim exchanges immortalized on the Instagram account Beam Me Up Softboi. Forget sex; the boy just wants to read.
Lily’s 2018 debut, On Hold, was a breakup album that she hesitated to label a breakup album, lest the narrative be reduced to “girl sad about boy.” It was predisposed toward trembling, somber indie folk in the vein of Daughter, music for wordlessly watching rain collect on a windowsill. Like so many young artists whose work is interchangeably praised as “intimate,” “raw,” and “vulnerable”—elevated under the belief that catharsis equals profundity—Lily wrote pretty, sincere songs lacking specificity and verve. Nearly as cliché as philosophy bros are songwriters with hushed vocals and spare guitar inspired by For Emma, Forever Ago.
BREACH, Lily’s first album for Dead Oceans, is a scruffier, more far-ranging record about developing a self in your twenties. Its version of early adulthood fits within the liberal-arts ethos of a show like High Maintenance: Subjects include self-medicating with weed (“Alapathy”), worrying about social media’s impact on your self-perception (“Solipsism”), and reaching new self-understandings in Western Europe (“Berlin”). Lily wrote “Berlin” after rereading Patti Smith’s Just Kids and embarking on a lone odyssey to the nightclub Berghain, that infamous colosseum of sin and techno. The result is a lulling slowcore ballad that resembles an old Taylor Swift gem and features Lucy Dacus on backing vocals. At its center is a tentative assertion of self-sufficiency: “It’s not hard to be alone anymore.”
For Lily, writing this record meant learning to distinguish between being lonely and being alone. In the absence of a relationship, you cannot flee yourself; you detect unresolved insecurities as if they’re stray hairs on the sofa. The jangling wind chimes at the opening of “Elliot” hint at a new beginning; the innocent baby babbles on “98” offer perspective on just how much she’s grown. There are a few recollections about relationships, too. “Laundry and Jet Lag” deploys a predictable metaphor that compares leaving an ex to quitting cigarettes (“I’m left with the scars/Of you”), although its muted strings are lovely. A song like “Birthday” is wiser. Sprinkled with wry, macabre imagery—“You sent me a head on my birthday/You said it was made with love”—it reveals the retrospective humor to a wobbly relationship, the strangeness of contorting yourself for someone else.
Little on BREACH compares to “I Used to Hate My Body But Now I Just Hate You,” a slow burner that sketches a shitty relationship with impressive economy. “I read all of the books you recommended/I listen to your friend’s band all the time,” Lily recalls, painting crushing as a sad combination of masochism and striving. Each verse is like a work of flash fiction. She fell for this person quickly; they performed intimacy as if for an elevator of strangers; and he moved on before she could play it cool. By the end, the person is long gone, sequestered at his parents’ home. But we still assign meanings to relics. The closer—“I still see you as some kind of reassurance that someday I’ll be understood”—discloses how our identity forms in the push and pull with others. People come and go, and each time, they leave us with a different version of ourselves than before.
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