Holly Lovell—Hello Chelsea

The album opens with If I Can Make It There, a proper New York soundscape. It sets the scene like the opening shot of a film. You’re not quite sure yet if it’s just context or if the city is about to become its own character in the story, but either way, it’s atmospheric, and it pulls you in.

Louis & Me kicks off gently, acoustic and sparse, and anyone who knows me, especially my love for female vocalists, won’t be surprised to hear I was all in within the first few bars. There's this softness to it that catches you off guard in the best way, like overhearing something you weren’t meant to, but glad you did.

Then we get to Hello Chelsea, and I honestly don’t know what it is about this track, but it keeps pulling me back. It’s a slow burn, really intimate, and the vocals? They're right there with you. The verses are understated and warm, but the chorus just sort of wraps around you. It’s dreamy, almost meditative, like you’re drifting and don’t want to be brought back.

If I Had It My Way shifts gear slightly, there's a country feel thanks to some lovely, subtle slide guitar. But overall, it stays in folk territory. Lyrically and vocally, it echoes early Suzanne Vega, introspective and deliberate. The next track, Lion’s Den, carries that thread but feels more fleshed out. Not necessarily more polished, but fuller somehow. Like it’s grown into the space the previous track sketched out.

Then things take a bit of a turn with When Did I Lose You. It's more upbeat, and the shift in energy is refreshing. Not because you need a break from the earlier songs, far from it, but because those ebb-and-flow transitions make the whole album feel alive. The end of this track is something else though, that wild, layered build-up, that controlled chaos… it’s got that Day in the Life (yes, Beatles) vibe. An absolute gem of a closer for side A, if albums still had sides.

Back down to earth with I Love You, which feels like a quiet, kind of aching look at long-distance love and all the things left unsaid when you finally see each other again. There’s something beautifully mundane about it. Like the realness of those awkward silences when you should be saying something important but... don’t.

Grief hits hard, in the way that only a sparse song can. It’s short on lyrics but long on emotion, and anyone who's dealt with grief will likely feel seen by this one. The extended outro, mostly guitar and drums, feels like a slow exhale, not quite closure, but maybe a step in that direction. A balm, maybe.

Then Helpless Mother, and yeah, this one feels personal. You can almost hear the shift in perspective, like a journal entry written years later. It’s about parenthood, change, and the weight of watching life circle back in ways you never anticipated.

Selling Your Shoes is... a bit of an outlier. It's short, lyrically poignant, touching on themes of letting go and moving forward — but it has this odd energy. Like a live track recorded in an empty room. No atmosphere, no audience noise — just raw. It kind of snaps you out of the album’s spell. For me, it actually would’ve worked well as the final track. That unresolved, floating quality has a finality to it.

But then comes Family, and I take that back, because this one earns its place. It starts fairly straightforward, but then, right around the two-minute mark, something stirs. The guitar kicks in, the vocals lift, and there's this absolutely glorious minute-long stretch of hypnotic repetition. I didn’t want it to end. But then, just like that, it does. No fade, no warning. Like hitting the end of the runway at full speed and realising there’s nowhere else to go.

100 Different Ways wraps it all up, and again, it feels like you’re being let into something deeply personal. Not in a performative, look-at-my-pain kind of way, but in that raw, confessional style that you don’t get unless an artist really trusts the space they’re in.

I try not to read too much about artists or albums before listening, it’s too easy to be nudged in a direction or start looking for things that maybe aren’t there. I’d rather go in clean and let the music hit me where it wants to.