The Dutch-British songwriter Tessa Rose Jackson lets her songs oscillate between intimate immediacy and artfully crafted arrangements, between delicate miniatures and almost ambient soundscapes. This creates a sound that in some moments brings to mind long-forgotten artists like Vashti Bunyan or Linda Perhacs, and in others the alt-folk bands of the early 2000s.
Everything appears warm, permeable, often psychedelic – and at the same time is precisely modeled. Jackson’s theme is transience, but she approaches it without melancholy. “Grace Notes” formulates this perspective clearly: “I’m not the woman I thought I’d have to be by now.” The song explores expectations, self-image and physicality, but remains calm, almost comforting.
“The Bricks That Make the Building” also radiates this calm. Jackson tells the story from two perspectives – that of a ghost returning to his former home and that of a child reflecting on his origins. The beautiful sentence songs give the piece a fragile polyphony, while lines like “The bricks that make the building / And the earth that feeds the garden” distill the album’s leitmotif: that life and transience mirror each other. In “Built To Collide”, however, the melodic indie pop of the early Saddle Creek school shines through, Rilo-Kiley in particular comes to mind. A bit of lightness that balances the album perfectly.
This review appears in Musikexpress 2/2026.