Lily Hiatt begins Forever, her sixth album, singing about discovering a “Hidden Day” tucked away somewhere between Thursday and Friday—a secret to be shared among confidants, performed exultantly. It’s a fitting keynote for Forever, an album that wears its intimacy as a point of pride yet doesn’t sound like we expect intimacy to sound; Hiatt appears right at home settling into its joyous racket.
The tender tenor of Forever is a far cry from the bruised heart beating through Trinity Lane, the 2017 album that served as the Nashville-based singer-songwriter's critical breakthrough; it’s also a shift from Walking Proof, the adventurous, colorful album Hiatt released in the early days of the pandemic, in 2020. Forever marks a distinct change in musical direction for Hiatt, taking her away from her Americana origins and into shambling alternative rock indebted to the glory days of grunge.
The catalyst for the shift is Coley Hinson, a Nashville-based musician she married in 2022. Operating on the fringes of the Music City since the second half of the 2010s, Hinson amassed a handful of notable credits—including co-writing a tune on Brent Cobb’s fine 2018 album Providence Canyon—before he played on a pair of tracks on Lately, the record Hiatt rushed out in a daze in 2021. The pair hit it off so well that they formed a duo called Domestic Bliss, with a name that walked the line separating sincerity and snark. Domestic Bliss cut a record at home, releasing it without fanfare in 2023, but a new album from Hiatt didn’t come as easily. She spent that year putting out singles that were seemingly part of a new album, but she ultimately switched gears, ditching that project in favor of a new collection of songs, all featuring Hinson at the mixing board as well as playing the lion’s share of the instruments.
Despite Hinson’s heavy presence, Forever is a decidedly different listening experience than the unvarnished Domestic Bliss. Forever is very much a complete studio set, a successor to the densely detailed Walking Proof but effectively its opposite. Hiatt painted Walking Proof on a broad canvas, layering each song with vivid colors, giving it a vibrancy that felt playful even when it drifted into melancholy. Forever is barbed and direct; its blemishes are intentional. Those rough edges—distorted vocals, clanging acoustic guitars, thick waves of fuzz, and wailing organs—are all given a distinctly ’90s alt-rock bent by Paul Q. Kolderie, who previously mixed Radiohead’s The Bends and engineered the earliest Pixies records. “Man” is the one song on the record that could conceivably be categorized as country, but the sunbleached chords, ghostly echoes, and sighing steel guitar also play like an excavated tune from Mazzy Star.
Some of these alt-rock accents carry slightly ominous overtones, but that’s a feint. Hiatt sounds exceptionally comfortable in her skin, singing with an open heart and continually returning to images of contentment. Underneath a swirl of oversaturated guitars and falsetto singing that uncannily echoes Tanya Donelly at Belly’s peak, the album’s title track gives the game away with its refrain: “I wanna be by your side forever.” That contentedness reverberates within the lively “Evelyn’s House,” an ode to a home where “We make good music here/And our problems, they disappear.”
Hiatt’s candid emotions feel earned; her open-hearted melodies and punchy hooks play out like a series of unguarded moments. Instead of revealing the scars from a ruptured romance, as she’s done in the past, she’s celebrating the stability a supportive marriage provides. Teamed up with Hinson, Hiatt sounds relaxed and assured, even when she's making righteous noise.
