Over the past half dozen years, A.A. Williams has emerged as one of the most distinctive artists in contemporary alternative music, bringing together elements of post-rock, folk, classical composition, and a broad palette of heavy music within a sound that is unmistakably her own. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with her work will recognise it instantly.
Arriving four years after its predecessor, Solstice reflects the confidence and ambition of an artist who continues to push herself creatively, pairing deeply personal songwriting with arrangements that run the gamut from understated and intimate to powerful and vast. Since first attracting attention with her debut EP back in 2019, Williams has toured extensively across the UK, Europe and beyond, sharing stages and artistic inspiration with the likes of Cult of Luna, Explosions in the Sky, and Russian Circles. Her two acclaimed albums Forever Blue and As The Moon Rests, alongside explorative projects such as Songs From Isolation and the orchestral reinterpretation arco, have demonstrated both her versatility and willingness to take risks.
With Solstice, she adds another compelling chapter to a career defined by artistic growth and a refusal to stand still or rest on her laurels. The vocal delivery on the record is characterised by the crisp enunciation that has become a calling card. Absolutely none of the regret, pain, or renewal dripping from this collection of deeply personal songs can be lost when there is this level of clarity in every syllable. The effect of moving through the world with this album in your headphones is profound, like an undercurrent that pulls you down while you look upwards towards the shrinking, distorted image of the sun.
A.A Williams’ confidently foregrounded lyricism elevates the Solstice from the outset. Opener ‘Poison’ comes out of the gate with the quiet devastator “You’ve always seen that I needed something to take the edge off; a mellow poison, you slide under my skin, and I liked it.” Love as poison, love as addiction, love as self-destruction; the track sets the table for the shadow-drenched feast that’s to follow. Solstice is a record that carries within it too many vocal highlights to mention, from the soaring refrain of ‘Wolves’, through the barely contained rage of ‘Just a Shadow’, to the rousing sense of rebirth in the swell of closer ‘The Gentle Harm’. Adding further gravity to the soul-searching journey, sometimes it’s what isn’t said that weighs most heavily. In a moment of pure self-awareness on ‘Hold It Together’, Williams sings, “Don’t you know this isn’t easy, feeling everything so deeply”. The track is structurally lopsided and leaves words behind early in favour of a swelling, extended crescendo that hits all the harder for its wordlessness.
Although A.A. Williams herself is undeniably the gravitational centre of Solstice, not only as composer, songwriter, and vocalist, but also through her gorgeous passages of piano and cello across the record, the work of Matt De Burgh Daly is crucial, with the multi-talented Maybeshewill musician elevating the compositions with elegant production and mixing, as well as providing structural ballast through electric guitar and bass accompaniment. Fold in the mood-perfect drumming from percussion ace Wayne Proctor (King King) and mastering from Grant Berry (Employed to Serve, Boston Manor), and the result is an intoxicating reckoning that will find a place inside you and stay there for a very long time.