SG Lewis, 'Anemoia' Album Review

Over the past decade, SG Lewis has slowly become the pop girl’s portal into club music. His fingerprints are all over pop’s most decadent dance records—Future Nostalgia, What’s Your Pleasure?, Dirt Femme—quietly establishing him as one of the most prolific producers and collaborators of the modern pop scene. Last summer belonged to him twice over: first, with his full-bodied Balearic house on the HEAT EP with Tove Lo (my personal summer 2024 soundtrack), and then again with his feature on “mr. useless” from Shygirl’s Club Shy EP.

People say we didn’t get a Song of the Summer this year. I’d argue we actually had two, both courtesy of Mr. Samuel George Lewis. In May, he dropped “Back of My Mind,” a track that feels comfortingly familiar, like it was plucked from the depths of my 2014 SoundCloud likes (which makes sense, given 1D VIP Julian Bunetta’s production credits and Cassian’s mixing). It simultaneously feels like golden hour on a Barcelona rooftop and the peak of Calvin Harris-era dance-pop (Lewis was seemingly just a few weeks ahead of the internet’s current 2016 nostalgia tour). In July came “Sugar,” the lush, Shygirl-featuring disco-dance track that grows more addictive with every listen, paired with an appropriately Ibiza-set music video.

While the last two summers cemented Lewis’ place in the mainstream pop-to-club pipeline, his roots trace back to the DJ booth. Before the high-profile collabs and glossy production came sets grounded in the sweaty grit of IRL club culture. He’s spent a good bit of time post-pandemic returning to these roots; he and Tove Lo hosted a series of Club HEAT sets in London, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco last year, taking over small-capacity rooms that pulsed with body-to-body energy. Forever Days, the label he launched last year, focuses on “music strictly for the dancefloor” through live events and club nights. Lewis is committed to cultivating environments that demand connection while simultaneously evoking nostalgia.

Most Popular

Lewis’s third studio LP, Anemoia, centers around place and memory. “Anemoia” comes from the Greek words for “wind” and “mind,” and is defined as “the feeling of nostalgia for a time, place, or experience you’ve never known.” The title speaks directly to the kind of internal world-building that happens when you mix memories with observations and imagination. Anemoia, then, is Lewis’ soundtrack to all the times and places he wishes he’d experienced firsthand: ‘90s Ibiza nights, Studio 54’s heyday. As a self-described nostalgia addict, I’ve had my fair share of anemoia: for peak Laurel Canyon rock, for Olympia’s ‘90s grunge scene. Everything is imagined through rose-colored fragments, but feels lived, regardless. The album’s cover mirrors that liminal space: Lewis stands at the edge of an empty room high above the clouds, looking out into a pink-lilac haze.

Anemoia follows up 2023’s AudioLust & HigherLove, which pushed Lewis further into a solo identity. Though the former’s tracklist is evenly split with solos and features, Lewis still puts his own voice first. Opener “Memory” acts as a doorway into the record’s world, as if you’re standing next to him at the edge of that empty room, looking out at the blurred landscapes of memory (“The places that exist on the edge of our memory”). The solo tracks spiral into trancey tangents that last longer than you realize—you only notice how deep you’ve sunk once the next song starts. They’re songs you can zone out to, whether you like it or not.

Lewis emphasizes those extended trances on “Past Life” and “Fallen Apart” (living up to his 2023 declaration in Rolling Stone that trance would be the future of pop). The former stretches a single lyric (“Fall asleep, dream of a life / Move slowly, time passing by,”) across the whole song, chorused and falsettoed, popping in and out between the twisting, chilled-out beat. The latter is more introspective and brooding, building off the hook, “It’s better that we’re falling apart now,” with a RÜFÜS DU SOL-style melodic sheen that keeps the pop catchiness intact. Lewis’s biggest strength is the way he threads pop sensibilities throughout club structures, making songs infectiously captivating rather than watering them down. The lyrics, though thin, are effective enough, sometimes on the nose but still reinforcing the greater architecture of transportive atmospheric sounds.

Closer “Baby Blue” creates another transportive space, this time with Oliver Sim of The xx, whose vocals cut through the haze. Lewis blends their sounds seamlessly, allowing Sim’s voice to become malleable, stretching and bellowing over the tropical house groove. Even as Lewis pushes his solo instincts further, collaboration remains at the core of his process. On Instagram, he explained, “All of the collaborations are the result of friendships I have formed over the last 10 years in music, and most of the music was made in the studio at the end of my garden in London. For that reason, this album feels like a part of me.” While Anemoia is inspired by a time traveler’s dream itinerary, it’s a London record at heart: reflective and personal, built in his flat during a rare period of stillness. Lewis transfers his pop instincts into different niches of house, trance, and disco without losing intimacy.

Lewis’ features are carefully chosen, each one tied to the nostalgic or transportive atmosphere he’s building. Some callbacks are even personal: Frances (from his 2021 debut, times) and TEED (from 2018’s Dark EP) return, grounding “Another Place” and “Devotion,” respectively, in Lewis’s own history. Shygirl delivers “Sugar” with the same ravey punch as “mr. useless.” Single “Feelings Gone” with London Grammar scratches the mid-2000s UK dance-pop itch; Hannah Reid’s vocals sound quintessentially expansive and piercing, adding a wistful haze to the déjà vu-like lyrics (“All I know is there’s this feeling / I’ve been here before”). Electro-funk highlight “Transition” features London R&B techno artist RAHH, whose vocals glide with a disco-diva edge over record scratches and vocoder, evoking a Studio 54 buzz. Each collaboration feels deliberate, and while six separate vocalists can lean overcrowded, Lewis weaves his own vocals throughout the tracklist as connective tissue. By grounding fantasy in friendship and memory, Lewis steeps Anemoia in tactile shared experience.

SG Lewis would be pleased to hear that I got second-hand anemoia from listening to Anemoia. It floats through eras familiar and fantasized, with a yearning rose-colored glow that makes the whole thing feel like the 2010s in the most heartstring-tugging, “good ol’ days” way. It boils over with the euphoric catharsis I’ve been chasing since pre-pandemic. Listening feels like I’m inside that clip of Carrie Bradshaw spinning in a circle with her arms up. Lewis continues to shine brighter, his voice a stronger presence even on a smaller percentage of the tracklist. It feels like he’s more comfortable with where it fits best, in those winding, faraway tracks hazily caught haze between real-life and a dream. He’s still one of the best collaborators in pop, and Anemoia proves he’s hitting his sonic stride; expansive, deliberate, and transportive, bridging his own gap from DJ-producer to bona fide standalone artist.

SG Lewis Dreams in Disco on Anemoia

The Reading musician's latest proves he’s hitting his sonic stride; expansive, deliberate, and transportive, bridging his own gap from DJ-producer to bona fide standalone artist.