Speak in the Dark

The debut album from British Bengali artist Tara Lily is an electronic jazz and soul conceptually based on the artist’s experience with ADHD. Her sound palette is synths, electronic percussion, piano, and string arrangements and the mood is dreamlike, at times pensive, at times blissful. It feels like the songs are built on field recordings and audio reflecting off surfaces, with long cascading reverbs and circling echoes filling up the sound field and generating a gauzy, heady atmosphere. 

Soultronica tracks like “6 Feet Down” with Theo Croker or Surya Sen’s “Like The Ocean” float along on buoyant rhythms with added filmic orchestration with Lily’s voice — a subtle, beguiling instrument — right at the centre of the mix, and while “Breathe Now” and “Double Time” expertly incorporate employ drum & bass beats, the rest of the album is languid in pace, with plenty of space and stillness that very gently ascends into moments of genuine musical beauty. Intense, alluring nocturnica.