Lael Neale – Altogether Stranger (Sub Pop) (13th Floor Album Review)
On Altogether Stranger, her third album for Sub Pop, Lael Neale continues to refine a sonic and lyrical aesthetic that is poetic, direct, haunted, and haunting. Once again, she is aided by the intuitive production of Guy Blakeslee, whose analog, cassette-based methods give the songs a sonic immediacy and emotional intimacy.
Blakeslee favours ambient textures, analog tape, and first-takes over polish, helping the songs feel discovered rather than designed.
Central to the sound of the album is the Omnichord, a vintage electronic instrument whose tremulous tones hum through the record like a ghost in the wires. It is a perfect vehicle for Neale‘s writing, which blends spiritual yearning, environmental anxiety, and fragile hope into something deeply resonant. She inhabits the tensions between place and movement, progress and nature, rather than trying to resolve them.
Opening track Wild Waters sets the tone with claps like thunder and guitar strums that build tension. Neale‘s vocals are bright, clear, almost liturgical as she sings: “Save me a place at the table / Say grace / I’m eating my words / But still wasting away.” It is a dramatic start, with visceral imagery.
All Good Things Will Come to Pass follows with a wry invocation. Beneath rumbling guitar and strings, Neale delivers a biting fable of human ambition, charting a descent from divine instruction to suburban sprawl and environmental damage: “Our feet only know pavement / And the ocean is a trash can.” It is satirical, even humorous, yet underpinned by genuine lament.
There is a shift with Down On The Freeway, where motorik rhythms and hushed vocals create a sense of motion and quiet rebellion. The beat pulses forward, and the lyrics long for escape: “Get me out of the lines / Out of the city.”
Sleep Through The Long Night is a brief and potent hymn for the overstimulated. Words fall like distant bells, echoing the feeling of trying to rest in a world that refuses quiet: “The traffic is static / No station to heaven.”
Come On bursts into life with high, breathless vocals and nervous energy: “If all that you were wanting / Was to feel belonging / I’ll be there too.” The track fades as it arrives, like a flicker of light in an overcast sky.
The album’s emotional centre may be Tell Me How To Be Here, where grinding guitars and static open into a prayer of uncertainty. Whistling winds, cabinet doors that won’t close, and insomnia builds a world of dislocation: “Can’t sleep at night / With jazz through the window / And all that is unknown.” It ends in a whirl of chaotic noise, capturing the disorientation of modern urban life.
New Ages stomps in with distorted strums and heavy reverb. Neale slows the tempo to a mournful march, declaring: “I’ve been a queen / I’ve been fortune’s fool.” Its spiritual counterweight, All Is Never Lost, follows, beginning in near silence and rising slowly, like a church organ lifting a prayer skyward. The refrain “There’s still a light inside of us” is simple, almost childlike in its faith.
Closing track There From Here returns to themes of movement and yearning. Neale sings a benediction like someone watching and waiting for her own departure at the airport: “I want to go somewhere sunny and clear / But I’m sad as the last unsold souvenir.”
Altogether Stranger is made up of songs of the rural and urban, clarity and mystery, silence and static. Across its nine tracks, Neale explores cycles of hope and despair, the impact of progress, and a longing for something grounding and lasting. The title reflects a sense of becoming “altogether stranger” to oneself, to others, to a shifting world.
In an age of hyperbole and distraction, Neale offers a lo-fi hymnal dreamscape; its quiet, strange beauty helps us hear hard truths more tenderly.
John Bradbury
Lael Neale’s Altogether Stranger is out on Sub Pop Records on Friday May 2nd.
Altogether Stranger is available to preorder on CD/LP/All DSPs from Sub Pop. LP preorders from megamart.subpop.com (North America), MM2 (in UK/EU), your local record store and at Neale’s live shows will receive the limited Loser edition on Lavender (NA) and Magenta (UK/EU) vinyl. There is also a special edition available through Rough Trade in the UK and EU on Cream White vinyl (All LP colors whilst stock lasts!).
