Keeley Forsyth’s music reminds of me of Emma Stone dancing as both exist in a neighborhood or two away from the familiar while offering a far more compelling story.
The Hollow, released on FatCat Records last month, is actress and musician Forsyth’s 3rd full length following up 2020’s Limbs (review) and her debut Debris (review) from 2019 with each one showing up here as a Download of the Week. She’s now 3 fer 3.
Forsyth told The Quietus, “I love taking ideas and sounds and unraveling the deeply bound feelings behind them in my work.”
And from the liner notes:
The bleak and foreboding landscape surrounding Keeley’s North Yorkshire home seems to inhabit her third LP, ‘The Hollow’. The moors, visible from her studio window, impact upon a music that feels made of these places: windswept, rain-soaked and blinking through the low-lit landscape. The album’s title derives from discovering a long-abandoned mining shaft whilst out walking – the past lurking within and haunting the present we now occupy. A connection to time that places us within it, facing what is gone and what may come. But also, perhaps that time has no concern as to whether we’re here or not.
The Hollow has been on near daily repeat of late as I mend from another gastrointestinal delight, this one requiring doses of Morphine and Oxy to tame, and the deeply felt otherness, the spectacularly lovely aching oddity that comes out of The Hollow has provided a very welcome home for my thoughts far away from the here and now. I’ve mentioned Nico each time I’ve talked about her music but The Hollow adds a clear reference to another altre favorite Scott Walker who Forsyth recognizes and shares as a major influence.
If you like your beauty borne from a soil rich with repulsion and pain, The Hollow beckons.