Hannah Georgas - All That Emotion

The Guardian 80

(Brassland)
Georgas’s fourth album, immaculately produced by Aaron Dessner, traverses a personal and sometimes opaque journey

Taylor Swift isn’t the only singer-songwriter with an Aaron Dessner-produced album out this lockdown: the National man also recently lent his talents to Hannah Georgas, a Canadian musician with a nice line in intricate and introverted indie-pop. All That Emotion is Georgas’s fourth album, but it still cleaves to the same basic principles of her earlier work: busy, layered backdrops; a tendency to fall through the cracks between folky guitar fare and jolting electronica.

Pitchfork 66

Produced with the National’s Aaron Dessner, the introspective Canadian singer-songwriter’s stately fourth album evokes an atmosphere of quiet loveliness.

The Guardian 0

(Brassland/Arts & Crafts)
The Canadian singer-songwriter’s biting lyrics and gentle delivery find an ideal foil in producer Aaron Dessner

Fans of the National might have spotted the burgeoning Canadian singer-songwriter Hannah Georgas opening for the band on their 2019 tour, taking on backing vocals, too. Georgas’s own songs are gossamer things, sometimes revealing unexpectedly deep undertows. Here, on her fourth album – the follow-up to her 2016 breakout LP, For Evelyn – they make a fine match for the producerly flutters of the National’s Aaron Dessner, now mainstream-famous as the enabler of Taylor Swift’s recent indie-folk conversion, Folklore.

Key track Pray It Away is a case in point. A bittersweet song that that addresses her conservative family’s struggle in accepting same-sex unions, it finds Dessner’s susurrations picking their way around Georgas’s withering lyrics and gentle delivery. Here and elsewhere, her punches come wrapped in velvet gloves – but they come. “You’re dead to me,” Georgas croons on Habits.