Big Picture

10 elegantly rendered tracks, uncovering an intersection of The Clientele and Waxahatchee. [Jun 2023, p.91]

The record is the most full, warm, and light Lily’s songwriting has ever felt.

Lily's clean and refined songwriting on Big Picture has her following in the footsteps of the similarly polished and venerable Laura Marling while sharing an emotionally intuitive sharpness and tongue-in-cheek propensity with fellow contemporaries like Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers.

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.

Her voice has a warmth and a quaver that can wring pathos from even the most conversational lines, and the production by Brad Cook (Hurray for the Riff Raff, The War on Drugs) furnishes her with warm, lived-in atmospheres. Every track has something to sink into, like the pinging, playful background vocals throughout “Pick,” or the airy, breathy coda of “2+2.”

The album goes on to offer a range of dreaminess, arguably reaching its lushest and loudest point on the jammy outro to "Superglued," its liveliest on the appreciative, post-breakup "Lights Light Up" (though there is a case to be made for the jaunty but fatalistic "Pick"), and its sparsest on the brittle, comfort-seeking "Henry," which still features a full band. The musical contrasts aren't far-ranging, however, and similarly, even the most optimistic lyrics seem to be biding time.

Over quiet vocals, nifty guitar pickings, and an open diary of personal confessions, Lily sets out 40 minutes of warm, stripped-back introspection. The tempo barely lifts above a sway, but if you lean into the motions, the familiarity comforts more than it wanes.