Lead single and title track ‘See It All’ is the ideal introduction to the record. The song has roots in a psychosomatic episode which turned out to be an inflection point in Lizzy Dutton’s path towards improving mental health. It opens as a relatively simple folk song but unfurls into something as vivid and enveloping as the experience itself. Alek Barkats and Geoff Saba add piano and clarinet respectively, bringing to life the album’s orchestral sensibilities and furthermore highlighting its ability to be at once inventive and intuitive.

Oh, well I think I’m going mad
I know there’s something there
There’s something there

I hope you see it all

See It All is out on the 25th April via Anxiety Blanket Records and you can pre-order it now.

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Take opener ‘Lullaby’, a succinct track as tender as its title suggests, though within the warm nighttime comfort exists something less certain. A doubt implicit in the very need to reassure. “It’s okay to say / how you feel,” Dutton sings, “know the mystery inside / is just as real // it’s okay to say / goodbye.” The title track offers a more upbeat energy but retains this balance of conviction and doubt. The forgetfulness of the title pervasive but not complete, a sense of longing persisting through the gloom which acts as an energising force.

I forget where I am from
cus everything looks the same
I forget the branch and stone
I forget everything

amnesia
amnesia
I still know I’ve got to see ya
I still know

Uncertainty is again a key feature on the moody ‘Living Archetype’, while the dawning warmth of ‘When Summer Ends’ finds hope it the promise of change, no matter how far off such a transformation might be. “When summer ends / I’ll be a new woman,” Dutton sings, “when summer ends / I want to be with my woman.” ‘New Mexico’ follows as a kind of practical realisation of these dreams, with weeks of quarantine and months of trying to feel again, before closer ‘Human’ attempts to place such struggles within a wider experience of life. An acknowledgement of loss as a ubiquitous thing, not as some descent into pessimistic dread but a manner of coping. If pain is common to us all, then what’s the use in holding on to guilt and shame?

am I human
if I can’t bend
is it human
to avoid our end

Amnesia is out now via Ghost Mountain Records and you can get it from the Lizzy Dutton Bandcamp page.

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