Ever Illusive UK Soulstress, ELIZA Returns with an Analogue Soul Odyssey, ‘A Sky Without Stars’
Evan Dale // September 17, 2022
ELIZA has been curating a sound that feels form fit to another era since she began releasing tracks under her newly minted moniker – to accompany her refined sound – in 2017. Removing her position from the pop-heavy industry machine that previously held a stranglehold on her aesthetic, a natural bout of exploration led her to something inescapably her own. Tracks from a period of self-discovery a half-decade ago, like Alone and Unafraid and All Night, still bleed today with an understated nature, bridging epochal and stylistic gaps. Connecting dots between overt inspiration drawn from the timeless soul of D’Angelo and the instrumental silk of Prince to the experimentally unnerving emotion of Radiohead and the passionate ache of Nirvana, ELIZA makes music for the rainy-day romantics. Unbound by era, bound instead by a chic kind of sulkiness, her voice populates a void left somewhere between the sad boy sex icon sphere of Brent Faiyaz where bass-heavy R&B bleeds with emotion and the wholesome, acoustic emotionality of Raveena where a nuanced exploration of emotion takes center stage, albeit always tethered to a genial minimalism unparalleled by others in the scene. Somewhere suspended between the past and the future, yet fiercely anti-modern, hers is an aesthetic that fleeces an authentically analogue soul, tinged with the most delicate of electronic soupçon for an air of indefinability and presence.
Five years is a long hiatus for an artist of such up-and-coming stature. 25 million views on her 2017 COLORS rendition launched her – and the COLORS platform still in its early stages – into a stratosphere of the moment that allowed artists featured there to remain relatively anonymous even under the spotlight. Eventually leading to the release of her debut album, A Real Romantic, 2017 was only the beginning of an organic journey to center herself musically and personally.
Time well spent, it would seem. Or at least, given the state of the last five years for everyone on planet Earth, as well spent as that time could have been. Emerging on the other side of it all, ELIZA has grown into something even more enigmatic and stalwartly unique, maturely fusing her many influences across genre and era to bring to light a new sound altogether. A Sky Without Stars breathes immersive and delicately nuanced, yet powerful in its quiet, soulful strength.
In its entirety, the album plays like a live set, embodying the jazz club bearing at the heart of what so much of the London-centric Neo-Soul resurgence has come to mean for music over the last decade. Authenticity steeps into its every high-hat, slappy bass stroke, and squeaky slip of the hand across a guitar’s mahogany face. For a moment largely defined by perfection and digital mastery, A Sky Without Stars is righteous in its pursuit of imperfect organics, honest in its outcome. For a moment defined by the short track, economically driven to count more streams, A Sky Without Stars is immersive in its length, compositionally cinematic. Dropping its listener in a foggy drive up a cold coastline or a train ride with raindrops streaking across the window, ELIZA is always encapsulating the sentiment of a humid chill in the air and the emotional spectrum that orbits it.
A Sky Without Stars also further embodies the notion of its title. Removed from the sky and the stars by cloudier, polluted emotions, and literally too, a search for stars and a sense of purpose drives ELIZA’s melancholia. ‘At least in the cities of the world… we are barricaded from the skies, the stars, the universe, and our perspective of the position we hold within it. I wonder how much of an unhealthy impact that has on all of us,’ she said about the title. Through the album, that sense of hopelessness in the hunt for higher ground and deeper perspective rings anthemic lyrically and simply by means of the emotional breadth her and her band explore. ELIZA has always been an emotionally in-tune songwriter, and even though her register often plays more like a soothing melodic instrument than it does outrightly belay her poeticism, it’s worth taking on that deeper listen to feel even more directly what it is she’s really speaking on.
There exists, too, a sense of endlessness and circularity through the album that feels attributed to it melancholic texture, its meandering exploration, and the particularly melodic use of ELIZA’s vocals as instrument over messenger. When listening, it’s easy to become submerged in subconscious thought as tracks seamlessly blend into one another. The silky deep of the band, and the permanently mellow register of ELIZA’s delicate soul ensure that tracks bear free flowing consistency, disallowing for the energy and emotion surrounding them to escape the same trap for which the album was named. The soft, off-grey void hanging above us haunts the project at length. The composition curated to bring that musical space devoid of time yet steeped in emotion, makes A Sky Without Stars sound more like a vinyl session than one embarked on Spotify. And that only further delves the project into its other-era identity.
A Sky Without Stars ultimately exists without definition, sans the understanding that it’s the album ELIZA was always destined to make. Soulfully minimalist, acoustically restrained, inherently organic, and subsequently unique for the modern moment, it’s a fresh reminder of just where Soul and brash creativity can go when an artist of understated cool takes the initiative to breath it all into existence in accompaniment of raw emotion.