Låpsley - Through Water

The Guardian 80

(XL Recordings)
Låpsley’s second album is stripped of collaborators, but its clean aesthetic highlights the scars of real experience

On her 2016 debut, Liverpudlian electronic pop singer Låpsley worked with a brains trust of songwriters and producers to try her hand at chart anthems, trip-hop and – in the joyful Operator – a disco track that ruled festival season. For her second album, she seems to have brushed away the lint left by an excess of collaborators, instead writing and producing everything herself with input from a sole engineer, and honing in on a singular, clean aesthetic.

The Guardian 80

(XL)

Following the release of her precocious debut album, 2016’s Long Way Home, bedroom auteur Holly Låpsley Fletcher took time away from music to take stock, to do voluntary work with teenagers, to train to be a doula and to inadvertently become a big influence on Billie Eilish. The palette of sounds she draws from on the long-awaited, and largely self-incubated, follow-up is familiar – her pitchshifted vocals lend her an androgyny at times, as on First, in which she gives the illusion of duetting with herself – while the ability to conjure emotionally potent songs from the most minimal of raw materials nods to James Blake.

What is less familiar are her more outward-facing lyrics. Whereas her debut was all about the personal, Through Water is more explicitly political, no more so than on the opening title track, which addresses the climate crisis via quotes made from a speech by her water engineer father. The standout recent single Womxn, meanwhile, tackles female self-confidence via a gloriously uplifting hook. “I look, I breathe, I feel like a woman”. She saves the most affecting song for last, Speaking of the End making its mark with just understated piano and her unadorned voice.

Pitchfork 68

The UK singer refines her sound into something moody and aquatic, trading a narrowly escaped adult-contemporary fate for narcotic electronic pop with ASMR undertones.