Ella Williams, who records under the name Squirrel Flower, weathers the storms thrown at her. The Massachusetts singer-songwriter’s 2020 debut, I Was Born Swimming, introduced her as a folk-tinged rocker bearing witness to life’s vacillations—the passage of time, seasonal depression, and the shifts within her own heart. One year later, the apocalyptic road trip record Planet (i) elevated these reflections to seismic levels as she envisioned natural disasters like droughts, fires, and floods. Now, Williams has shared Planet EP, a self-produced collection of tracks rescued from the Planet (i) cutting room floor alongside demos and a quietly powerful Björk cover. After releasing full-length albums at a steady clip over the past two years, Planet EP feels like a long-awaited exhale.
Williams has described Planet EP as “an exercise in self trust and experimentation,” a reminder that not every recording needs to reach finality before being shared. As a result, the EP is loose and unpolished, just Williams, a guitar, piano, synthesizers, and the ambient city sounds that spilled through. Williams lingers in the hazy twilight hours with her closely miked vocals wrapping the listener in warmth. “Ruby at Dawn” transports you into this mindset with its sleep-kissed lyrics about a walk home at daybreak. Most of the song is carried by Williams’ gentle multi-tracked vocals and a minimalist organ line until a flourish of synths introduce a subtle sweetness.
“Your Love Is a Disaster” longs for intimacy from someone who seems ill-suited to deliver such care. It is a lovely gesture when Williams’ own multi-tracked harmonies offer the companionship she yearns for. “Live Wire” is more assertive as Williams lists the things she would do “to be with you,” which include cutting her hair, leaving a lover, and killing her friends. “To be with you, I’d fuck it all,” she proclaims with a sudden cruelty before softly adding, “And leave at the first sign of snow.” It’s the EP’s most challenging moment and the only one that breaks through the pensive melancholy that cloaks the release.
For the most part, Planet EP moves patiently as Williams watches time unspool, from the purgatory of traffic, or out in nature as the seasons change. “Open Wound” acknowledges that “healing’s not a straight line,” which justifies her apparent inability to convey the extent of her pain. “You think that I’m a wave/But I’m undertow,” she sings over a delicate acoustic guitar. “Long Day’s Done” begins with the chirping of birds as Williams captures a moment of tranquility as flood waters encroach. (A line off Planet (i) comes to mind: “And I’m not scared of the water/The rain is my parent and I am the daughter.”) Near the end of the song, she takes a moment to question perception: “How to define a horizon linе/Does it have to be a linе,” she wonders. “A meeting of points with no direction/A cease of movement, an intersection.” Williams’ existential searching leads her to cover Björk’s “Unravel,” a staggering meditation on love’s elasticity from 1997’s Homogenic. The reverb-drenched rendition is more lo-fi than the original, but it offers a promising vignette for the territories Squirrel Flower might plumb next.
