alayna — Set Her Free (Nettwerk) (13th Floor Album Review)
Set Her Free by alayna moves with restraint and confidence. These songs stay with the small shifts that matter, the moment when longing becomes clarity, when vulnerability is held with control.
The Rotorua born singer-songwriter has steadily built a following for her intimate blend of pop, soul, and modern R&B. She sings with a patience that feels central to her music. There is a sense of someone choosing carefully before speaking, letting songs emerge from stillness rather than urgency.
Her debut, Self Portrait of a Woman Unravelling, was written inward, a record she has described as emotional excavation, an extended therapy session of self understanding. Set Her Free comes from the other side of that intensity. Here, she turns outward, tracing the ways love holds, binds, and shapes a life.
What is striking is how much alayna’s working world has expanded. Her debut was shaped within a small creative circle. Set Her Free opens outward into a wide songwriting network, with Ben Malone as primary co-writer and producer, while Simon Gooding and Joe LaPorta return for mixing and mastering, giving the record a familiar finish.
Across 13 songs and 41 minutes, the album unfolds through different manifestations of love: romantic, platonic, self love, feminine love. Each track feels precise, testing what love sounds like when viewed from the mind, the body, or the heart. Musically, she works in a space of emotive pop, soul, and R&B, arrangements kept luminous and uncluttered.
From its opening moments, the record establishes its atmosphere. Love of My Life begins in a drift of overlapping tone, a low drone that feels uncertain and slightly disorientating, before alayna enters slowly, her voice clear against spare piano. Echoes hover behind the vocal, then fall away until she is left almost alone. Strings enter gently, and the track winds down again to voice.
Much of the album’s power lies in how it allows emotional distance to exist. But It’s Lonely offers one of the record’s clearest truths, love persisting alongside absence rather than cancelling it. “Oh I’m so in love, but it’s lonely,” she admits. Strings follow the vocal in slow steps, leaving space for the words to land. A low pulse gathers underneath before the song drops back to voice and echo, sharpening what remains unsaid.
That same restraint runs through Hold Me, where piano frames a vocal delivered with conversational clarity, gradually rising with controlled intensity. The music presses forward, then eases back, keeping her voice at the centre.
Elsewhere, warmth enters without breaking the album’s poise. I See You begins with lightly strummed guitar as her vocal takes on a storyteller’s tone. Drums and bass swell into a slow late-night groove, widening and then receding again.
On Softly, she sings of imbalance, of searching for something outside herself, only to realise what has been carried all along. The refrain lands gently but firmly: “Falling in and out of love, but I still land softly.” It becomes the album’s emotional centre.
When the record shifts toward the body, it does so with subtle force. Animal brings a more physical energy, notes reverberating at the edges as the rhythm turns briefly dance-like before a drum-driven pulse takes over. The song moves between motion and pause, echo and release, desire as something visceral and immediate.
Then Mother’s Mother steps back again. Garden imagery, water, roots, and lineage coalesce into a song of gratitude. Synth tones swirl around a slow beat, deepening as the song turns more reflective. Emotion remains, but it is carried with a steadier hand.
In the final stretch, On Your Way Home (Interlude) acts as a wordless bridge into the unhurried title track, in which alayna returns to the record’s central question, repeating “What of I, if I set her free?” Rather than resolving love into certainty, Set Her Free leans into openness, into the sense that freedom is a practice, not an endpoint.
On this record alayna explores intimacy. Throughout, her voice remains its anchor: close, conversational, held in restraint as she traces what love is, and what it leaves behind. Even at its most vulnerable, her delivery stays clear, patient, and composed. She waits for the right words, the right notes, the right emotional temperature. In that steadiness, Set Her Free finds its lasting power.
John Bradbury
Pre-order / Pre-save alayna’s upcoming new album
SET HER FREE (out Feb 13) HERE
Click here to watch the 13th Floor MusicTalk Interview with alayna
