Winged

A flicker of light was the namesake of Lia Pappas-Kemps's first EP, 2024's Gleam, but the Toronto singer-songwriter's full-length debut Winged proves that she's more than just a flash in the pan.The idea of depicting a new indie rock-adjacent local artist often conjures one blurry-edged, vague cipher with a pretty generic sound profile. While Pappas-Kemps is adamantly a deviation from the norm, depending on where you start with her already-chameleonic œuvre, that may or may not be immediately apparent.The second half of Winged opens a portal that makes it undeniable. On a twisted, knotty tree trunk of a song called "Wound Up and Coiling," Pappas-Kemps kicks the project's mouth agape as the titular tension becomes too much to bear. "If you don't hear it as a whisper or a murmuring," she sings quietly, embodying her own words, before a frenzied, ascending final syllable: "Would you downright believe it if it came right from the horse's mouth?"What follows is a crescendo of drums and guitar that wouldn't feel out of place on a song by whatever cool post-punk or art-rock band Reddit is obsessed with this week, or even the juggernaut that is evident influence Blue Rev by Alvvays; one short, swift motion making the song roar to life like the most satisfying pull of a chainsaw cord.Subsequent track "Orchid" returns to business as usual with its ruminative pattern of acoustic minor chords, until it, too, tears itself apart just past the two-minute-and-35-second mark — but it's not until 30 seconds later that the song sheds its delicate petals to singe human skin with a guitar-led instrumental breakdown that feels equal parts meditative and menacing.Pappas-Kemps told NOW Toronto that lead single "Towers," co-written with her cousin Elia Pappas, is "the most straightforward song" on the record. It is, and it's magic: "I blurred the vision / With precision," she trills at the top of the second verse, revelling in her own power for deception before the bridge descends into sublime noisy guitar that gets overtaken by the wavering fuzz of smeared radio frequency abstraction.Perfectly toeing the line between an alt-rock radio hit and an electrified B-side on an avant-folk odyssey, it's the kind of song that feels like it emerged from the ether; an unsettling crow that has already memorized your face, still holding a grudge against you from some past life. While there are plenty of references to birds — "Weaving in and out like a needle / Arms outstretched like an eagle" ("The Hunches"), "Your beam of light narrow / You shot me down like a sparrow" ("Reservations"), and that's just the first two tracks — in Pappas-Kemps's hands, Winged better calls to mind a stone angel, carved from an ancient ache to oversee realms where the living and dead collide.The singer-songwriter has the timeless gift of transforming her own hurt into stunningly beautiful vignettes. She paints herself as someone whose heart is a barroom wherein people amuse themselves by kicking up dust, dancing "a delusional self-important two-step" (the steadily unsteady "Two Step"), reflecting on a exploitative relationship in a way that splits the difference between the still-yearning nausea of "Motion Sickness" by Phoebe Bridgers ("My whistling kettle / Singing your name forever") and the righteous fury of Taylor Swift's "Would've, Could've, Should've."You'd be hard-pressed to argue that there isn't something haunting — and haunted — about Pappas-Kemps's material; she calls herself "the girl with the hunches" ("The Hunches"), after all. The majority of Winged moves fittingly mysteriously, armed with the foresight of knowing something the listener doesn't yet. The artist can often be found sidling, creeping and skulking her way through a song with the smouldering intensity of Fiona Apple on Where the Pawn... before reaching some kind of revelatory moment where she comes more fully into focus, the instrumental blooming around her in an understatedly triumphant flourish.Even compared to Gleam, which had a perfect shapeshifting pop anthem in "Switchblade," on Winged, Pappas-Kemps has maintained a salt-of-the-earth sense of balladry ("I adore you right before you / Make me eat dirt," she oozes in a single breath on the serpentining "Moths") while leaning into her more experimental impulses to dizzyingly exciting ends. For as much as she calls to mind the innovative guitar-playing style and figurative songwriting of Joni Mitchell, the glitchy-to-galvanizing atmospherics of Winged increasingly evoke In Rainbows — an album that feels nearly as thrilling to listen to all these years later as it did the first time.However fully formed, it feels damning to compare a young singer-songwriter's debut to a record with such a towering presence in the canon; like a curse, even. But it's surely a premonition Lia Pappas-Kemps has had, heralding a future she seems ready to step into.