Album of the Week: Lapsley - Long Way Home

Shapeshifting is the new rock’n’roll. It’s noticeable that the performers who are enjoying the most traction and attention of late are the ones stepping away from the traditional templates and moulds.

Some singer-songwriters may stick rigidly like hidebound conservatives to closing their eyes and strumming their acoustic guitars, but the real adventures in this form can be found elsewhere.

In ways, there must have been some temptation for Holly Lapsley Fletcher to follow a certain script. The Stockport teenager is blessed with the kind of big voice you’d imagine would fit well alongside equally large ballads and radio-friendly songs. After all, she’s signed to a label who have done well thanks to a woman called Adele, so the lines are already written.

But as Long Way Home shows, Lapsley has other ideas about where she wants to go and that's the stuff of a debut album which is often evocative, occasionally melancholic and always intriguing.

That voice is just one in a number of attributes which makes her worthy of attention. You can hear why names like James Blake (the artist who has become the go-to comparison point for so many newcomers), The xx, Majical Cloudz and Banks have been thrown into the narrative.

But Lapsley takes the icy, alien electro-soul trappings and accoutrements which those acts have made merry with and does something quite idiosyncratic with them.

You can see this in her songwriting especially. The introspection of tracks like Love Is Blind, Tell Me the Truth and Hurt Me – the titles alone showing where she's coming from lyrically on themes of love and loss – are beautifully embellished by gorgeous waves of haunting electronic minimalism.

Through it all, Lapsley keeps the emotions and the moods turning and tumbling, a performer hugely in control of the narrative she’s writing. A class act. musiclapsley.com