Fenne Lily Measures Her Joys and Sorrows on Big Picture

It isn’t easy to traffic in subtleties. Where many of today’s best indie-adjacent projects thrive in minimalism—in the style of Florist—or in hooky maximalism—a la Phoebe Bridgers—Fenne Lily seeks a Goldilocks-esque, happy medium, balancing delicate instrumental layers with pensive vocal delivery. On Big Picture, she handles her emotions with caution, as if she writes while wearing oven mitts, and her restraint makes her sharpest lines pierce even deeper. Take the first lyric of opener “Map of Japan”: “I never asked you to change and you’re treating me like I did / The more I’m thinking about it, maybe I should’ve started.” Delivered plainly over sauntering percussion and splendorous guitar, the hard pill she administers goes down sweetly.

Big Picture is an exercise in excavating Lily’s last couple of years: A tumultuous period marked by transitions accelerated through 2020’s unending calamities. As she unpacks her memories, there are undeniable pangs of sadness and longing—but there are also moments of tender revelation that betray the soothing quality of memory. Across the album’s ten tracks, Lily displays her memories with care, inviting listeners to occupy her vantage point, encouraging them to sit in the discomfort she endured and through which she found new possibilities.

Lily’s decision to frame her sometimes-ambivalent, sometimes-crushing feelings with bright instrumental arrangements is less an exercise in curious juxtaposition for juxtaposition’s sake and more an attempt to make the composite forms her feelings take crystal clear. On “Lights Light Up,” Big Picture’s lead single, it’s a tickling guitar riff that unfolds into brightness atop gentle, adult-contemporary drums apt for a backyard barbecue playlist. She gently introduces a scene from her own life: a relationship where love abounded, but moving on felt imminent; a space where the emotions are so conflicting that they risk inspiring inertia.

Complete with a richly colored, sometimes-cosmic music video, “Lights Light Up” is one of Big Picture’s emotional and artistic triumphs. “Dawncolored Horse” exhibits the same gossamer. The lilting vocal delivery with enchanting guitars further invites listeners into Lily’s technicolor bubble, one where freedom from tension or expectations in a close relationship gives way to simpler realities.

Other tracks enter gently and grow into something bolder. “Superglued” has the soft minimalism of a Julia Jacklin number, foregrounding Lily’s mellow delivery. As she meditates over the word “superglued,” the guitars erupt into calamitous noise with a peculiar, entropy-laden rhythm, which contrasts with the meticulousness that Lily usually deploys. Immediately following is “Henry,” a plodding ballad with sparse drums and keys baked in a haze that resembles omnipresent, nagging stressors that grow more and more potent as the track draws on.

“Half Finished,” Big Picture’s closer, embodies Fenne Lily’s success with the subtle swell best. Over a sprawling five-and-a-half minutes, and with the merciful intensity of Lucy Dacus, Lily languishes in a stasis that clearly won’t hold, addressing both fear and desperate desire for drastic change. Tension grows as the day-in-the-life chorus crescendos: “He’s got tickets to see a band no one knows / She’s got my name on a t-shirt she’s never worn and she won’t / They’ve got a fear of things changing but I don’t mind / I made no promises that I would stay but I’ll try.” The puzzling-but-familiar web of longing and stressors erupts into a cacophonous brevity before the record closes in ambiguity. It’s her most compelling end-of-record to date.

While not every song has the guts of “Map of Japan,” the luminescence of “Lights Light Up” or the dynamism of “Half Finished,” Big Picture is a successful meditation on tension, an act of sitting in the discomfort. Fenne Lily has become a veritable expert on the subject, and her approach to narrating that process is engaging and novel. One can only hope that these contradicting feelings meet resolution sometime soon, but, for now, the music is thoroughly appealing.

Listen to Fenne Lily’s Daytrotter performance from 2018.