On first listen, you might mistake a song like Dying Twice as a straightforward piece of confessional folk-pop. Go deeper, though, and it soon becomes apparent that all sorts of other things are going on. The arrangements, for starters: flights of woodwind and exploratory basslines, thoughtful flourishes of piano and an aching guitar solo. It’s chamber-folk with a nod towards experimental alt-rock, nostalgic acoustica tempered by soft-focus electronics. And then there’s the lyrical content. Crabs, fear, asphyxiation, plane crashes. There is some wildly imaginative stuff going on here, equal parts compelling and disturbing, and it’s all done in service of some very real and pressing issues: the ongoing environmental catastrophe, in this particular case.
This is how Nora Stanley works: her songs are caresses, and while the primary intention of a caress is to impart pleasure or display solicitude, a physical touch can also be a disconcerting thing, laced with its own various layers of meaning. Brooklyn-based Stanley has previously been known as an instrumentalist, accompanying a variety of well-known artists from Cassandra Jenkins and Beth Orton to Fred Frith, but she has found her feet as a songwriter with remarkable speed and apparent ease. It helps, perhaps, that her primary muse is the poet Anne Carson, whose intensely personal lyric The Glass Essay forms a kind of emotional and creative mirror to many of the songs on Glass. This is most notable on Red, the haunting acoustic heart of the album. Red is essentially a song about love, but not in the traditional balladic sense. Rather, it is about the way creativity – and in this case a specific creative work – is crucial to human life, to understanding how human emotion works. Like Carson, Stanley understands that glass can be a window or a mirror or an invisible boundary, which is to say that approaching something with a kind of poetic care is key when trying to make sense of it.
And care is a key component in the album’s opening track, Bonsai. It flickers and unfolds, changing tack from an impressionistic palette of flutes to a gentle bedroom-folk melody and back again. It then focuses itself on a gentle but driving rhythm section, morphing into low-key alt-rock with some distorted electric guitars but never losing sight of its delicate roots. Both musically and lyrically, it is a lesson in nurture and growth. Headstone is similarly attentive: a slow-paced exploration of a severe breakdown in mental health suffered by one of Stanley’s friends. St. Elmo’s Fire is a languid, wiry rocker that flowers into a winning vocal melody. Along with Noble Gas – where choppy guitars and peppy percussion lend a power-pop feel to proceedings – it helps ensure there is no mid-album lull.
At times, Stanley’s songs seem close to artists like Cate Le Bon or Dana Gavanski, but certain facets of the production edge the sound nearer to that of US bedroom-pop auteur Greta Kline (Frankie Cosmos), and it comes as no surprise to learn that producer Nate Mendelsohn worked with Kline on 2022’s Inner World Peace, perhaps the most introspective Frankie Cosmos album. Here Mendelsohn helps achieve a rounded and structurally complex sound that is nevertheless welcoming to the occasional lo-fi element. On the stripped-back Linger On, this manifests as a deceptively folksy simplicity, but, like Dehiscence-era Wendy Eisenberg, both melody and lyrics are more challenging and more interesting than you might expect. Coincidentally, Eisenberg provides liner notes to Glass, and the two seem to share a similar musical energy.
As Glass progresses, its personal and political themes seem to twine around each other more and more inseparably. Penultimate track Geography Lessons, with its acoustic guitar, soft-focus clarinet and rainy-day piano, describes how witnessing an episode of casual racism on a train leads to a journey of self-reflection. Catfish, the album’s finale, reaches another level of consciousness entirely: ‘I can see what I couldn’t see before,’ sings Stanley over a flat plain of synth, her voice soaring as the instruments drop in and out, flirting at the intersection of ambience and melody. Like everything on this quietly gorgeous album, it is perfectly timed and executed with a grace and lightness that is extraordinary for a debut.
Glass (July 31st, 2026) Worm Records