Léna Bartels

On her sophomore album of abidingly strange and brilliant rock songs, The Brightest Silver Fish, Léna Bartels often writes from somewhere in between emotions. The Brooklyn singer-songwriter observes patterns playing out between her narrators and others—sometimes from a great distance, sometimes from so close that all we can make out is gradient color and blurred motion. She explores the unintentionally destructive ways we express care for one another—how coercion can feel inseparable from desire, and how people become so accustomed to feeling disempowered that they forget their own agency. Informed by the attitude of ‘90s alt-rock and the tight craftsmanship of classic singer-songwriters like Rickie Lee Jones and Aimee Mann, Bartels shifts her musical landscape boldly with the needs of each scene, creating distorted images of a haunted, uncertain world. The Brightest Silver Fish follows Bartels’ potent debut Preservation (2022) and this winter’s split release with Nico Hedley, It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year. Its songs take place within moments in which the subjects feel simultaneously trapped in their bodies and hovering somewhere above it, infatuated and suffocated, enthralled and repelled, tentatively hopeful but fundamentally skeptical. Her characters seem to be pursuing ideals that are as precious as they are elusive, like a silver fish glinting in the water—things that are exactly what they are, unambiguous, illuminating a path towards a more inspiring future.