If Laura Groves is a name you don’t initially recognize, then maybe you are familiar with her former moniker, Blue Roses. When Groves was barely in her 20s, she put out her then-self-titled album Blue Roses through XL Recordings in 2009 and it was a great portrait of romanticized youth—a project that enacted a proper balance between the adventurous bends of life and its coiling, sometimes insurmountable, downswings. She put forth great singer/songwriter harmonies back then, conjuring flickers of Joanna Newsom and Judee Sill atop a bed of lush, plucked and subdued soundscapes. Now, 14 years later, Groves has returned—this time, under her own name. Her latest offering, Radio Red, is a triumphant display of how wide a creative palette can stretch.
The London songwriter has a unique approach to her own world-building and characterization. Radio Red is a folk album in spirit, yes, but an electronic record sonically. There are touches of soul and synth-pop adrift with Groves’ acoustic-driven foundation, something she worked through on Blue Roses, too, but nowhere near as deftly. Radio Red wants to be many things, and it succeeds at adopting each outfit—which is not a feat so easily met these days, especially in the still-going conversations around genre. As soon as Radio Red’s opening track, “Sky At Night,” rings in, it’s clear that Groves has taken to a different musical plane this time around. Merging dream-pop piano with the bravado of a chart-topping vocal set, she muses on the cosmos while trying to understand a lover. “I can’t pin you down, for the love of trying,” she sings. “I’m getting you on that wavelength, maybe?”
Radio Red is a pop record through and through, as a song like “Good Intention” has the groove and sensuality of a 1990s mega-hit. It’s like a perfect mixture of Janet Jackson’s Janet and Mariah Carey’s Music Box, as Groves allows her vocals to play out like a rollercoaster—coasting through pitches and octaves that only emphasize her command of finesse on the track. The instrumental flashes like a sugar-sweet bedroom-pop mix, with joyous, dreamy singing. “I overhear you in the distance,” Groves croons. “‘Ready to love!’ And I abandon all resistance.” It’s a beautiful ode to surrendering to the affection we crave. Closing track “Silver Lining” achieves a similar boundary, as Groves makes good on releasing any feelings of possessiveness in the name of growing older and finding more appreciation in natural love. “You’re my silver lining,” she sings, over a beautiful, serenading synthesizer pattern. “I love your perfect timing.”
Groves takes the focus off of her keyboards at various checkpoints across Radio Red. On “Synchronicity,” the track opens with a gorgeous minute-long guitar riff that is some of cleanest, shiniest instrumentation on a release this year. “Any Day Now” strikes a similar chord, as it arrives much more rock-oriented than any other entry on the album. Glittering drums rattle beneath a delicate strum, which might suggest that the backbeat is similarly muted like the rest of the record, but what’s particularly wondrous about Radio Red’s construction is that every component is built to serve the project’s greatest weapon: Groves’ voice. Even when the “Any Day Now” arrangement swells into a digital harmonization, it’s Groves’ vocalizations that pierce through the atmospheric habitat most vividly.
The record’s centerpiece is “D 4 N,” which finds English R&B singer/songwriter Sampha lending his vocals to Groves’ enigmatic, cathartic sound garden. The song conjures the work of Solange, a singer who Sampha has collaborated with in the past. With buzzing synthesizers that parallel something you might hear Daniel Lopatin employ on a Oneohtrix Point Never track, Groves sings of desire and intimacy through images of cinematography. “Just make me feel good,” she hums. “Don’t need to learn your lines, filming day for night.” When Sampha’s warm, enveloping tenor creeps in and ensconces Groves’ angelic singing, few moments in music this year have ever sounded so euphoric and perfect.
The back half of Radio Red is full of ballads that speak greatly to Groves’ understanding of theatrical minimalism. All of the tracks are piano-focused, which offers generous space for her singing to unfurl. “Time” is beautifully layered with streaking synths and a patient drum machine. Groves aches over whether or not pure love can override a lost trust in a romance, singing: “When you take me out, where the wires are moving secrets around, light through the open window somewhere out of town, keep telling me something.” It’s one of the most notable instances on the project where Groves is considering what weight her storytelling holds. “Time” is a benevolent masterwork that never outmuscles itself.
“Sarah” and “Make A Start” form a terrific set-up for the closing track, “Silver Lining.” It’s on these antepenultimate and penultimate songs where Groves assumes a true “singer and a microphone” image, intoning atop sparse instrumentation. There’s a tapestry of immense vocal range on display in these eight minutes, as you can physically hear her funneling every single drop of gasconade into each note. “And our worlds drift on, hard to keep yourself in orbit,” Groves laments on “Make A Start,” “And the spiral turns around, it keeps coming back. It counts for something.”
Much of the record taps into pastorals of interstellar imaginings, cosmic ways to make a romance shed its density and ascend towards limitless humanity eons above any grounded limitations. Radio Red is not just a character study on relationships; it’s an undertaking that focuses on compassion towards the people we adore and a curiosity for how we might begin to prioritize our own lights in spaces shared with others. The album is a welcomed full-length return for Groves, who has made two great, unflinching and patient records spread out a decade apart. Radio Red is a crystalline, shimmering pop enterprise that dares to ask what a project might look like when a synthesizer takes a backseat to a career-defining vocal performance. It’s a signal that what’s next for Laura Groves is sure to be another marvel just as mythical, intricate and rewarding. When she sings “I’ve got a lot to give” on “I’m Not Crying,” that truth has never sounded more certain.
Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from his home in Columbus, Ohio.