Slow Magic, the new album created and conceptually conceived by Jenny Lindfors, who records as Sailing Stones, with arrangements by her partner, composer Dan Moore, is one of the most satisfyingly complete collections of songs I have heard this year. It is both musically and lyrically built around the subject of matrescence, the transitions and major life changes a woman goes through at the time of bringing new life into the world. Which is not to say that only half the population will relate to this collection; it is a universal moment we all experience from different perspectives, and somehow the tone and texture of this work brilliantly evoke that hazy period. In the days when parents are cradling a newborn, time no longer moves in quite the same way. Days and nights merge into much the same thing; priorities are forever shunted into another realm wherein another life becomes more important than one’s own; personal nourishment and self-care take a back seat; and, to add more destabilisation to the experience, everything is carried out under a cloud of sleep deprivation. Personally, maybe it has something to do with my own under-five years, lived through the early seventies smoke of folksy singer songwriters and the daydreamy psychedelics of ‘Bagpuss’ and ‘The Magic Roundabout’ on TV, but the sound Jenny has refined here vividly conjures early-years nostalgia of the mind. The whole record plays like a kaleidoscopic whirligig, shimmering in and out of focus, crafted with a crackly analogue, hands-on human touch.
It was actually back in the early seventies that a legendary album began with the sound of a beating heart. But where that concept piece explored the pressures and psychological damage inflicted on us in adult life, Slow Magic is very much about the trippy days and months when a new child has arrived. And it is as multi-layered as you would expect such a complex subject matter to be; the emotional triggers ignited within a mother counterbalanced by the joy and wonder communicated by a child learning something new about its world on a daily basis. And these magical moments are just a temporary thing; the awareness that it is a phase rather than a permanent state you have arrived at is ever present, something Jenny reflects on in the opening song Innocent. She muses on how those woozy days can leave you wanting to never return to the adult world, to a place where you have made mistakes and not done things as well as you wanted to. The shrieking guitar clouds that glide past and early horror-movie flourishes of the arrangement do instil a sense of darkness that Lindfors was pushing for, stating early on that she wanted David Axelrod, Electric Prunes and Jefferson Airplane as sonic reference points. We do have these, but they are wrapped up in the most Harold And Maude-like folk dressing.
Like so many of the greatest albums, the seed of the idea for Slow Magic came from real life. Jenny became a mother for the first time in 2020 and again in 2024. “I remember telling my partner, I really want to write about this, but I’m too knackered, too sleep deprived” Jenny remembered of her firstborn. “I didn’t know who I was anymore. But I wanted there to be a record that spoke to my joy and my pain and my thin-skinnedness, like Joni Mitchell’s Blue spoke to female vulnerability around heartbreak. Not that I could write another Blue, but I knew I had to navigate the idea of writing about motherhood, especially as there’s a lot of shame tied around it.” Now that the end product of that initial spark is finally here, she is fully justified in giving this embryo all the time in the womb it needed. The whole piece has to be experienced as one; these songs are connected in every conceivable way. They mostly occupy a dreamy, ethereal space, although The Colour Of The Sun does jump forward both in tempo and in narration, recalling how her toddler daughter reacted with unfiltered delight upon hearing Karen Carpenter’s voice on the radio (a good sign if you ask me, a musical future surely beckons). It sounds to me like once Jenny turned the creative tap on, the songs flowed out as naturally as water, as she variously looks at drug-assisted labour induction, fuzzy parenting in the early mornings, and the cluttered memories of her own youth, a work of satisfying melodic beauty emerges. It is laced with an acid drip-feed of colours, focus, and visions, both real and imagined, as life pivots from monotone to technicolour. Slow Magic is exactly that: the gentle evolution of nature’s greatest magic trick, played out as time bends, spins, pulls, and pushes, but never stops. As a parent, Jenny will be fully aware you do not pick a favourite child, but as far as her albums go, she might quietly regard this as her best with some justification.
Slow Magic (July 3rd, 2026) Self-Released
Bandcamp (Vinyl/Digital): https://mssailingstones.bandcamp.com/album/slow-magic