Lucy Gooch – Desert Window (Fire) (13th Floor Album Review)
Lucy Gooch has steadily carved out a space for herself as a distinct and affecting voice in contemporary British ambient music. Emerging first with the EP Rushing (2020) and then expanding her cinematic textures in the EP Rain’s Break, (2021) she received critical praise for her ability to merge choral elements with synth-driven soundscapes that feel both ecclesiastical and intimate.
Compared to the likes of Julianna Barwick and Grouper, Gooch’s music is rooted less in experimental abstraction and more in emotional and spatial evocation. Her work is often described as floating, sacred, and steeped in longing.
With her debut full-length album, Desert Window, Gooch takes her sound into bolder and darker terrain while retaining the airy textures and layered vocal work that have become her signature. This is a record of elemental forces — air, water, clay, and cloud — but also grounded in the body and psyche. Created in collaboration with composer and sound designer Alistair Lax, whose fingerprints are audible throughout the album’s instrumentation and structural flow, it is interested in pressure and rupture as well as resolution.
The opening track, Like Clay, sets the tone with guitar strums and soft vocalising that slowly crowd in with multiple voices, humming and circling before Gooch speaks clearly, “Like clay in the ground exile is deep.” It is both gentle and disorienting, a drift into inner terrain through abstract lyrics. The hums and drones feel almost like breath or memory, eventually phasing out on light keyboard tones.
The centrepiece of the album is arguably the two-part Night Window, which begins with what sounds like church organ and brass over deep rumbling textures. Gooch’s voice is submerged in this swell, rising like an incantation before being almost drowned in synths. Part Two resumes with gliding notes and airy vocalisations before a buzzing drone lifts like a storm building. It’s a volatile piece in which moments of beauty are offset by sudden disquiet, like storm clouds quickly appearing on a clear day.
In contrast, Keep Pulling Me In is Gooch at her most direct. Over a gently breathing synthesiser and whispering vocals, she sings, “You keep pulling me in / Reflect back to me, come back to me,” and the track builds through phases of softness, pulse, and clarity. A quicker rhythm toward the end feels like it could lift off, but it circles back into darker tones before closing in a confident pulse.
Other highlights include Jack Hare, a pastoral yet unsettling piece with wind and string lines that conjure water and air. It turns darker with spoken lyrics referring to life and death, then flutters back into something brighter, a reminder of her folk roots. Clouds offers a lullaby of electronic repetition and the gliding cornet lines by Harry Furniss, disrupted gently by pauses and bass notes, its lyrics evoking natural rhythms and human transience: “You are existing between clouds you know you / You are stepping on and in between them.”
The final track Our Relativity begins in overlapping voices and dissonant drones before building to clearer structures. Guitar and drums emerge, rhythms rise, dissolve, and re-form in scraping and sliding sounds before fading out with a quiet foreboding.
Across Desert Window, Gooch expands her sonic palette while holding true to the qualities that first brought her acclaim: ethereal vocals, emotionally resonant lyrics, and sonically rich environments. What feels significant is the confidence of scale; songs are longer, the shifts more abrupt and the shadows stretch further. It is an evocative ambient dream pop album that uses acoustic instrumentation to deepen its emotional resonance. At times her vocals whilst a key instrument, are lost in the mix, and this may frustrate listeners seeking less abstraction and greater narrative clarity.
Where her earlier works evoked a mystical ecology full of warmth and haze, Desert Window feels more embodied and visceral, weather systems pass overhead and get under the skin. This is an immersive and introspective album that, while at times uneasy, is frequently beautiful.
John Bradbury
Desert Window is due out Friday, June 6th on Fire Records
