John Glacier’s debut studio album, Like a Ribbon, arrives with all the laudatory press (“perhaps one of the most London-defining artists of her era”) that comes baked into a release on Young, two years after she was featured, standing in front of Big Ben, in Daniel Lee’s first campaign for Burberry. It liberally references both the stylish post-punk rasp of London’s contemporary pop underground and the cool-kid electronic music that’s defined Young and sister label XL in the 21st century.
Many would wither in this kind of heat, but London-born Glacier is made of sturdier stuff. For all its familiarity—on both a musical and narrative level—Like a Ribbon is lush and engrossing, the rare Big Indie debut that outstrips its own hype. A lot of this can be chalked up to Glacier herself: She is a resolute, unflappable vocalist with a deep, unyielding deadpan that bleeds across the page. Although Like a Ribbon features producers as disparate as Flume, Evilgiane, and Kwes Darko, Glacier’s presence is a unifying force; like a Chantal Akerman protagonist, she floats through her environments with an unshowy magnetism, subtly shifting the atmosphere around her as she goes.
Like a Ribbon feels like a time lapse in album form, with Glacier’s largely arhythmic deadpan the only constant. Although she raps about parties, relationships, and her career, Glacier’s most indelible images come from peering at the edge of the frame. On “Found,” she zeroes in on “new green grass where the grass never knew,” a poignant, small-scale picture of renewal; the crunchy post-punk track “Money Shows” ends with an image of summer melting into autumn, a stark perspective shift after a song about the frantic life of a working musician. Although she’s willing to engage in the occasional Hot Young Rapper trope (“You best believe it, I’m the hottest in the game,” she raps on the twinkly rave track “Emotions”), Glacier always inevitably wanders back toward the natural world, an essential force in her music. If there’s an aesthetic push-pull at the heart of Like a Ribbon—between the simplicity of Glacier’s delivery and the relative busyness of her production—it’s one that echoes the relationship between the natural world and the city, one side offering respite and the other excitement.
Although Glacier is—not incorrectly—classified as a rapper by most, there’s a looseness to that tag that she happily exploits across Like a Ribbon. Over the dusty electric guitar that opens “Satellites,” she sounds a little like King Krule; delivering something close to a sing-song cadence on “Emotions,” you can hear the faintest echo of early M.I.A. And a lot of the album recalls Dean Blunt’s stuttering indie-post-punk-rap, as well as the work of his collaborators, like Mica Levi, Inga Copeland, and Tirzah. The industrial chug that powers “Home” feels of a piece with Levi and Tirzah’s work on the stark, aching trip9love…???.
“Home” is a hypnotic, mantra-like love song. Speaking to a friend or a lover, Glacier is promising safety, but the only metaphors powerful enough are elemental: “The summer leaves, they always turn to gold”; “Diamonds never rust.” The song is an embodiment of the only law that seems to govern Glacier’s world: in the face of hype, or bluster, or insecurity, nature transcends.
