Description
Label Review.
2019 album (Bombay Bicycle Club) also available on Vinyl.
Our Overview.
‘Pity Party’ is the new album from English singer-songwriter Liz Lawrence the long-standing Bombay Bicycle Club collaborator/touring member and former member of Cash + David. The album came off the back of launching the first single from the album – the pop banger “Navigator” which made NMF in 10 countries and has since had radio support from Lauren Laverne, Huw Stephens and Jack Saunders.
Moments of self-awareness were the germs of the ideas of what would become ‘Pity Party’, Lawrence’s first album in seven years. Through a combination of personal experience and exploring what is happening around her, Lawrence has written, recorded and produced an unvarnished yet defiant snapshot of her world right now.
“I think almost every generation is scared that their generation is going to be the last one,” she says, adding, with a knowing pity party flourish, “but it’s quite hard to deny that it feels as if we’re hurting towards disaster.”
For ‘Pity Party’ Liz dug deep and discovered her own sound, taught herself how to produce and soon realised that she had become good enough to make her own music in the way she wanted to make it, on her own terms. She released the first fruits of this experimental labour throughout 2018, as a series of double A-side single releases: “Chainsmoking”, “Circling Numbers”, and “The Good Part”. But none of these singles are on ‘Pity Party’. “The point was to clear things out, reestablish what I was up to, and what I was doing,” she says. It gave her the space she needed to rediscover her own identity, and who she was as an artist.
The fruits of her labour are brought together for this new album. She wrote six of the songs in just five days (while holed up in a dilapidated friends’ house in Cornwall) - proving that forcing herself out of her comfort zone and embracing a solitary existence - for a short time at least- reaped huge benefits for her personally and musically.
Having embraced this new musical identity with both arms, and judging by the calibre of songs littering ‘Pity Party’, 2019 looks set to be an exciting year in the career of this determined and talented British artist.
2019 tour dates supporting Bloc Party, Lacy Dacus, and Snail Mail.