To find out anything about Jennifer Walton, you have to chase the 29-year-old British producer across the internet. By day, she’s a part-time producer at NTS. She’s a live member of Kero Kero Bonito and part of singer Sarah Midori Perry’s side project Cryalot. Alongside aya and 96 Back, she forms the hardcore group Microplastics. That crew’s Mutualism label released Walton’s 2019 EP White Nurse, a spin on power electronics that explicitly rejected the genre’s fascist flirtations to remake it as a music of transcendence. (She’s also produced for Mutualism associate Iceboy Violet.) Her only other official solo release is a four-track EP of playful club music from 2020, although here she is popping up on BABii’s last album, and caroline’s, and providing the theme for one of the only good music podcasts; witness her dropping t.A.T.u. in one DJ set, or curating a hard dance outing for Boiler Room.
None of these disparate bio scraps can account for Walton’s debut album, Daughters, other than to trace the scope of disciplines behind a plainly visionary work set to transport her from the underground to the foreground. As a maximalist take on the disarray and distortions of grief, it feels worthy of comparison to Phil Elverum’s capacity for terror and awe. You could superficially liken its machine-anaesthetized intimacy to the work of claire rousay; Walton’s crushed, tactile evocations of the absurd to Laurie Anderson or David Lynch; the furiously detailed thumbscrew intensity to Hakushi Hasegawa, Aviary-era Julia Holter, or Sufjan at his most heated. But nor does any of that convey the aggressive beauty, desperation, and invention on show here.
When so much popular music integrates footnotes into the main event, it’s a rare treat to approach such a fully formed record knowing so little about an artist, to discern their creative identity and intentions solely through their work. You do not need to know that Daughters concerns the cancer diagnosis and subsequent passing of Walton’s musician father (Nigel Walton had success in the early ’90s as part of eco-feminist dance group Opus III) to feel undone by her cosmic and mundane evocations of grief. This tactile record, mixed by her friend aya, exists between the disconcerting distraction of dreams and the roughhousing confrontation of reality as life rearranges itself in the anticipation and aftermath of a loss.
Walton’s most distinctive trademark is in how she crushes together intricate, organic instrumentation and synths into pummelling cataclysms. Particularly in the first half of the record, her songs climax in joyful attacks that evoke the sounds of a Dance Dance Revolution machine arranged by a symphony orchestra. “Born Again Backwards” shreds the fabric of a once-known reality as gilded, militaristic percussion gives way to something akin to chiptune blastbeats, taking a beat to catch a breath through what sounds like a wheezy toy harmonica, then shooting off once again, spinning Walton’s voice like a top. “Lambs” contemplates looming apocalypse in a concerted attack that sounds like dozens of players slamming wood on metal, an analog recreation of abusing the midi orchestra stab key. The effect is as gorgeous as it is uneasy: Opener “Sometimes” starts as an elegant vignette of dislocation, perky with plucked strings, then relinquishes the exhaustion of maintaining that poise in a nauseous landslide of artillery drums, bleating synths, and brassy squall.
The landscape of Daughters is majestic in its desolation, marked by rattling barns, clapboard houses, dead animals, glowing motels, gas station perfume, infinite skies. As a writer, Walton keys into unavoidably painful and prosaic moments, like sitting “hunched and sick in the concourse” of a hospital on the purgatorial glimmer of “Saints,” the unceasing blip of monitoring machines woven into the fabric of the song, but she also contrasts the drawing of blood with praying for mercy. She has an instinct for myth, characterizing loss in cars crashed into lakes, hungry fires, the haunting feeling of hearing old English folk songs echoing out of context. On the racing title track, familial estrangement, once earthly (“I always muttered something like: ‘He was never around,’” she sings on “Lambs”), then the permanent schism between the living and the dead, is a map torn in two. You can see her world: Serene, obliterating, awesome, it swoops around you like a blizzard.
Several of Daughters’ songs take place in dreams, and the record hums with the calm detachment of observing disaster rather than being touched by it, reminiscent of the perpetually burning house in Synecdoche, New York. In “Shelly,” an older woman hits a deer, totals her car, and becomes a fable for simply giving up when life has overwhelmed you. Walton makes her self-immolation into a beautiful beacon: “For the only option now my dear/Is to set yourself alight/Be the candle in the night,” she sings in an ecstatic, ascending middle eight, before glittering pink lava overwhelms the song; the clanking exhale of woodwind offers another brief respite before it dashes off again.
That detachment can be a hallmark of grief, which remakes the familiar as shockingly alien. The best song on Daughters is a robotic ballad about seeing life through this awful new gaze. In “Miss America,” terrible news arrives by call to “a hotel room by JFK,” and a numbed Walton recounts all she has seen in her trip cross-country. Her writing is economical, incantatory, gutting. “Cattle farm and broke-down shack/Strip mall, drug deal, panic attacks/From my medicine’s co-pay/I’m Miss America for a day,” she mutters through a vocoder haze, sounding like she’ll never know solace again. The melody always resets, a dead weight anchoring her to this inescapably painful state of affairs.
But the album’s penultimate song is its inverse, embodying the monstrous feeling that grief can also induce. The voracious “It Eats Itself” drums up the rage, isolation, and monomaniacal incomprehensibility of loss, “how greed overwhelms the grieving.” Walton sings with the possession of a cloistered nun high on God’s visions, becoming a destroyer of worlds threatening to “watch your cities burn with kindling of bone/My vengeance won’t be quick, it’ll take a hundred years.” The beat of a menacing bassline and softly pounding drums builds as it powers her toward apocalypse, surrounded by tingling electric guitar, the glimmer of something like dulcimer, and silvery, shivering strings. It climaxes in a shriek of noise that suddenly snaps quiet, like a star folding in on itself, bereavement made tangible.
Ultimately, Daughters doesn’t have vengeance in its soul. Its coda is “The Only Way Out Is Through,” in which Walton and a choir of voices repeat “love will lead your way home.” As they incant the sentiment into being, the wheezing, radiant lullaby steadily cracks apart, getting subsumed by static. It feels like a moment of absolution, leaving behind the roadkill and neon-lit motels for a realm made of pure spirit. In just nine songs and 36 minutes, this gorgeous record traverses backwaters, dreams, dismal waiting rooms, the telluric and the metaphysical, hope and hell. It’s a world containing worlds by an artist only just beginning to show us what she’s capable of.
