Lanterns on the Lake

There's a moment at the outset of Lanterns on the Lake's sixth studio album, There's a Bird in My Ribcage, when singer and songwriter Hazel Wilde notices dust motes suspended in a shaft of light. An ordinary detail, easily overlooked in the relentless churn of everyday life. But Wilde is paying attention. "I used to shut it all out," she sings. "But I'm soaking it in now." By the album's close, that perspective has shifted dramatically: the Earth is a speck suspended in an indifferent universe. Between those two images lies a record about the beauty and weight of being alive to the world. Between the intimate and the immense, Lanterns on the Lake explore the lives closest to us, the suffering furthest from us, and the struggle to hold both in view at once. "The album is a refusal to go numb," says Wilde. "In a world that sometimes urges us to retreat into distraction, cynicism or performance, you find yourself aching for something more, and to hold on to something real." Written against a backdrop of division and desensitisation, the record insists on feeling deeply. The Mercury-nominated band have long conjured emotional weight from shuddering guitars, widescreen atmospheres and Hazel Wilde's unmistakable voice. But There's a Bird in My Ribcage reveals a striking new economy and immediacy. Tracked largely live in a church hall in Northumberland, with additional recording in their hometown of North Shields, the songs are melodically sharp, expansive without excess and performed with unforced assurance. They lurch, gather themselves, soar and abruptly fall away, their natural dynamics capturing the instincts of musicians who know one another inside out. "We wanted the songs to breathe and feel alive," Wilde says. "It's more about capturing a moment than perfecting it." In an age increasingly defined by simulation and disconnection, the record feels defiantly human. Throughout There's a Bird in My Ribcage, intimate moments collide with the wider world. On 'Heavy', a child kissed goodnight becomes a reminder of suffering unfolding beneath the same sky. Unease takes a more overtly political form on 'The Swarm', written against the backdrop of the far right's resurgence across the West. On the closing 'Last Days', the relentless consumption of images of suffering becomes its own form of moral paralysis. The ability to scroll past atrocity becomes both a defence mechanism and a terrible indictment. Yet for all its anxieties, this is not a record of hopelessness. These are songs that recognise the value of the present before it becomes something we can only look back on. At once uncertain and confident, tender and turbulent, There's a Bird in My Ribcage confronts the enormity of the world without losing sight of the fleeting moments that give life meaning. Lanterns on the Lake have found quiet power in the fragile, radical act of continuing to care. The universe may be indifferent. Lanterns on the Lake are anything but.