There’s A Bird In My Ribcage

There’s a moment at the outset of Lanterns on the Lake’s ‘There’s a Bird in My Ribcage’ when singer and songwriter Hazel Wilde notices dust motes suspended in a shaft of light. An ordinary detail, easily overlooked in the relentless churn of everyday life. “I used to shut it all out,” she sings. “But I’m soaking it in now.” By the album’s close, that perspective has shifted dramatically: the Earth is a speck suspended in an indifferent universe. Between the intimate and the immense, Lanterns on the Lake explore the lives closest to us, the suffering furthest from us, and the struggle to hold both in view at once. “The album is a refusal to go numb,” says Wilde. “In a world that sometimes urges us to retreat into distraction, cynicism or performance, you find yourself aching for something more.”

The Mercury-nominated band have long conjured emotional weight from shuddering guitars, widescreen atmospheres. But ‘There’s a Bird in My Ribcage’ reveals a striking new economy and immediacy. Tracked largely live in a church hall in Northumberland, with additional recording in their hometown of North Shields, the songs are melodically sharp, expansive without excess and performed with unforced assurance.

Lanterns on the Lake have found quiet power in the fragile, radical act of continuing to care. The universe may be indifferent. Lanterns on the Lake are anything but.