When the lily of the valley starts to bloom, it’s one of the surest signs of the end of the harshness of winter. In Victorian-era floriography, the perennial flower—native across the Northern Hemisphere—symbolized a return to happiness. As the land thaws, a cascade of bell-shaped buds and sweet scents spring forth, a herald of warmer months and better times to come.
This feeling of renewal and rebirth was clearly on the mind of Will Kennedy when he was working on Lily of the Valley, his new delicate lo-fi indie rock album as 22° Halo. Written while grappling with the realities of his wife and collaborator Kate Schneider’s diagnosis with brain cancer, the album looks intensely at the shared grief and anxiety of a period rife with doctor’s visits and uncertainty. Still, making the record, he wrote on Instagram shortly after its release, was a balm when things were at their hardest. “It’s helped me hold onto hope when Kate gets MRI scans every two months to see if her cancer has come back,” he said.
Kennedy writes unsparingly about the heaviness of their circumstances. “Cobwebs,” a brief song toward the album’s end, is its glowing emotional core. In a fragile low range, Kennedy sings imagistically about the weeks following Kate’s diagnosis. He remembers feeling the carbonation of a Diet Coke catch in his throat as he consults with a doctor, awaiting test results. He remembers seeing Kate gently console her mother as she heads toward surgery. Each lyric feels rich and intimate in a way that recalls Phil Elverum’s or Emily Sprague of Florist’s keen eyes for carefully chosen details. But even as he recalls these difficult memories, he never appears overwhelmed with maudlin emotion. The chorus of “Cobwebs” swells toward insistent percussion and prickly feedback as Kennedy and Schneider sing together about clinging onto the feeling that they’ll make it through: “I’m trying to believe that you’re good.”
This bittersweet optimism is the defining character of Lily of the Valley. Even when, as on the gently lilting “Ivy,” he remembers the gravity of what they’re going through together—“For a second or an hour,” he sings. “I’m reminded you might not make it”—he still finds beauty in the world around him. “CVS on a Walk,” sung in a near-whisper over twinkling guitar chimes, captures the intensity of the turmoil and serenity they find amid it. As Kennedy offers assurances that “the hair will grow back,” they take comfort in the pleasure of a walk to the pharmacy—such a journey isn’t without its struggles, but there’s peace in putting one foot in front of the other.
The album’s low-key arrangements are of a piece with Kennedy’s previous homespun work as 22° Halo. Still, they feel uniquely suited to the complicated emotions in these songs. Kennedy dabbles in the frigid plod of slowcore (“Noise Machine”) and the gentle fuzz of hazier indie rock peers like Hovvdy or Joyer, but on the whole, the songs feel personal and grounded without ever feeling melodramatic. The humble drumming and spiraling guitar lines give Kennedy’s understated vocals a forward momentum that befits the gentle hopefulness of the record, each lithely propulsive drumbeat a reminder to not give into the gloom.
In the final moments of the closing song, Kennedy invokes the full symbolic weight of the flower that gives the record its title. “Be the lily of the valley,” he sings. “You can make it the year, you can make it decades.” Rich with love and perseverance, Lily of the Valley offers poise and comfort in the face of unimaginably difficult circumstances—it's the sort of album that makes you feel like, just maybe, you can press onward too.
