Review Summary: Lush, joyous, and undemanding, Madeline Kenney’s latest finds her at her most comfortable—and comforting.
Madeline Kenney has always kept a healthy distance from her audience on her records, often acting as an otherworldly omniscient pondering aloud above perfectly rendered soundscapes. Rather than a fault, this has become a staple of her music—a necessary boon for the razor-sharp musings on young adulthood she delivers with her sweetly angular voice. She’s maintained this social distancing well, even as her sound loosened over time (the occasional sterility of
Perfect Shapes was obliterated by the time
Sucker’s Lunch came around, and the Mario N64 soundtrack very likely inspired parts of 2021’s
Summer Quarter EP). The more of Madeline Kenney we see through the cracks, it seems, the more comfortable she is.
A New Reality Mind is undoubtedly her most joyous album yet, wielding a wider sonic palate than ever, on an even broader emotional spectrum. The emphasis on music over her own voice this time around is immediately evident on early bangers like “Superficial Conversation,” where the music shifts to punctuate her harder hitting lyrics with a fluidity and dynamism like never before. Given how entwined her vocals are with her identity as an artist (“Cut Me Off,” anyone?), it might seem like a red flag to fans to see her leaning off them a little. Of course, Kenney is too smart for that. Her methodical nature may creep in instances like the precise, unrelenting beat of “I Drew a Line,” but only to emphasize a track’s more free-form, psychedelic elements, which are more present here than ever. Her former winks and smirks are largely replaced with dips into genre that bear no irony, each kicking its parent song to new heights. It never feels like a manufactured slideshow either—every detour sounds genuinely earned as a part of the album’s DNA. Even her influences are more prominent, with splashes of Lana del Rey, Kate Bush, and Sharon Van Etten surfacing on the album’s sublime closing run. By the finish, it’s clear that she’s hardly hiding behind her music—she’s just never been more confident putting it forward.
But still, Kenney stares down at us from behind that stellar yellow dress. It’s evident in moments like the final minutes of the stunning closer “Expectations,” where Kenney hums some of the album’s most gorgeous vocal lines through a vocoder, that she will always be an artist who needs her veil to speak truthfully. Some people prefer to be on the outside looking in at times—it’s what’s most comfortable for us. On
A New Reality Mind, Kenney proves that providing space for yourself doesn’t necessarily mean putting distance between you and others, it just means giving yourself room to be yourself.
