The Cross Sea bring us a feral collection of tracks on their self-titled album, polished and preened! The collection feels less like a record and more like a journey caught mid-transformation, vibrant and colourful!
Born out of urgency the album carries the electricity of change throughout, it was lived, experienced and carries that energy from the get-go. ‘The Me That Waits’ kicks off gently with acoustic guitars that sound like the early morning mist, and Anna Mērnieks-Duffield’s voice hovers with careful intimacy. Fuzz blooms, drums swell, the track erupts and honours its muse, it’s messy, devotional and sounds like someone chose instinct over safety.
‘There’s No Way’ pushes further into the art-rock genre, wiry, uneasy and pulling like nothing else, the track twangs with banjo and is filled with grit-heavy bass. Its vocals slip between crystal-clear and confronting and distorted. A friction-filled mix feels intentional and transforming, its chaos becomes its own architecture. The record then pivots on ‘Just Like Adrianne’ as it softens the edges without dulling them, it leans into a witchy, wood-and-soil indie folk sound, it’s earthy and surreal and emotionally transformative. Its arrangement breathes and sways rather than storms, ‘Just Like Adrianne’ sounds like you’re standing barefoot on cool grass after running through static.
Its followed by ‘Alien (Hold On to What You Love)’, a track that hums with existential dread yet refuses to collapse. Sonically, it’s fuzz-fuelled and eerie, carrying a low level of distortion and lyrically it wrestles with devastation, asking what kind of alien would choose destruction when care is an option. This track doesn’t preach, it steadies. Across eight tracks, this album feels like a study in contrasts that live in coexistence, acoustic calm lives alongside noise, simplicity rubs up against the chaos. ‘The Cross Sea’ doesn’t settle too long, and swims between love and fear, marries conflict and clarity and whispers and roars at the same time.
The real magic of this album that it doesn’t just feel like three musicians trying to prove something, it feels like three people in a barn in Hudson Valley that chose to see what would happen if they trusted the spark between them. ‘The Cross Sea’ is instinct captured in real time, it’s a record that feels both rooted in earth and reaching for something unknowable just beyond the lake’s edge.
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