Review
Review
Album Of The Week: The Big Moon – Here Is Everything
Parenthood and reconnection form the backbone of a stunning and emotional third album from the London quartet
The Big Moon had a bit of a moment with 2020’s brilliant Walking Like We Do. Veering away from the guitars, guitars and a few more guitars of their debut blew things open for the band, finding a blue-skied, widescreen pop sound that felt inspirational and celebratory. That album was a reaction to several years of political and social turmoil, but the band couldn’t have predicted the years that would follow.
While the world was consumed by a rolling news agenda of death, singer/songwriter Juliette Jackson welcomed new life with the birth of her son. That joy, fear, exhaustion and confusion wind their way throughout Here Is Everything – a title that feels immediately relatable to any new parent – but schmaltz and sentimentality are completely absent.
Even ‘Wide Eyes’, an emotional bomb of a song, manages to convey so much genuine happiness without a single misstep into ‘With Arms Wide Open’ territory. It’s one of many hugely affecting moments on a record that often feels like it’s grabbing you, shaking you and desperately trying to get you to feel what it feels, whether that’s positive, negative or a torrid mix of the two. All the above collides beautifully on standout ‘My Very Best’, a song that surmises everything brilliant and terrifying about parenthood in a way that shouldn’t really be possible. Like so much of Here Is Everything, it’s the possibilities that are most thrilling.
There’s a world of pressure in the situations the band have experienced since their breakthrough in January 2020: a pandemic, motherhood, following a hugely successful second album, recovering from the abrupt halt to their momentum. Just one of those things can prove incapacitating. Here Is Everything is the sound of a band that has struggled through it all together and come out the other side stronger.
In interviews with The Big Moon, their almost symbiotic connection is frequently noted. You can only imagine the struggle for such a close-knit group to be separated for such an extended time, but Here Is Everything sounds like the joy of reconnection. When the band’s voices and instruments blend into one voice, one sound, it’s like they’re a broken entity made whole. Recording in a self-constructed studio in drummer Fern Ford’s flat has afforded the band an inviting intimacy that somehow doesn’t lessen the scale they displayed on Walking Like We Do.
Here Is Everything by The Big Moon is out 14 October to buy and stream
