Fenne Lily wrote her latest album amid a creative slump whose timing is no doubt familiar to many. Her work stalled out during a post-2020 malaise that The New York Times summed up in an unsurprisingly viral piece as “languishing,” a word that suggests an indulgence in the act of doing nothing. Writing about forgettable days runs the risk of being forgettable, but on Big Picture, Lily lets herself surrender to that compromised comfort. Her voice has a warmth and a quaver that can wring pathos from even the most conversational lines, and the production by Brad Cook (Hurray for the Riff Raff, The War on Drugs) furnishes her with warm, lived-in atmospheres. Every track has something to sink into, like the pinging, playful background vocals throughout “Pick,” or the airy, breathy coda of “2+2.”
Most of the bitter, early-Laura-Marling humor of BREACH is gone here; nothing on Big Picture approaches the fuck-off stance of “To Be a Woman Pt. 1,” the pitiless gaze upon male red flags that was “I, Nietzsche,” or the wackiness of “Birthday”’s introductory severed head. Lily seems to be aiming for a more universal, classically sedate writing voice, and sometimes she overreaches and produces songs that sound as labored-over as she says they were. “Dawncolored Horse,” while competent, is a bit too obviously made of set pieces and conceits and a shelf that exists solely to be rhymed with “herself.” “2+2” begins with a faux-casual anecdote about how maybe she’ll look into “some guy called Jesus”—you know, just that dude—though Lily’s baleful vocal does the emotional lifting in the lyrics’ stead, and the song recovers in its lovely second verse.
Lily began writing Big Picture just before she met her then-partner and finished writing its last song just after they’d broken up. But there's no simple narrative to the album, no clean line from beginning to heartbreak. Every song is written from a place of indefinite stasis, of having an epiphany you didn’t want to have and don’t want to act on. “Lights Light Up,” with its disinfectant-bright guitar line and ending-credits pace, is very nearly a love song: Lily sings much of the first few verses, especially asides like “well,” like they’re little adoring looks. Then, without changing her affect, she punctures it with the unspoken, fatal truth that the relationship was held together by, “though we don’t really talk about it often, the fear of this getting old.”
Lily leans on these twists often, but impressively the returns never diminish. On “Half Finished,” she answers a companion’s offhand question with “sometimes I can’t help but picture a whole different life”; immediately the vocals drop away, as icebreaker becomes weepy. The melody of “Superglued” is bleak and deceptively layered: Every time Lily raises her voice or a sudden chord lets some light in, the whole thing just slumps farther down. Like “Lights Light Up,” there’s a love song in there somewhere, too, but not one you’d sing when you were in it. Likewise, the two most obvious breakup songs are also the most hopeful. On “Red Deer Day,” the song Lily wrote last, her vocals move through lines like “For the longest time I’ve imagined I am alone and now it’s real” without dwelling for emphasis or drama. It doesn’t fully register that the track is a breakup song until Lily has already moved on to the reassuring chorus; perhaps all those love songs were her pre-processing it, in her own time. “Map of Japan,” the album’s standout, is about another quietly decaying relationship and deferred realization. Cook and Lily’s arrangement is likewise restrained, except for the periodic interruptions of muscly guitar chords, placed loud in the mix. Each appearance feels a little defiant. They sound like reminders to oneself: Nothing has atrophied. Everything will be there where you left it.
