Wyldest – Monthly Friend

Label: Hand In Hive Records
Released: 28th May 2021

Wyldest is back with her second album, ‘Monthly Friend’, a pensive, intelligent dreamscape that bathes in her womanhood. The record boasts Zoe Mead’s shining, textural pop that’s reminiscent of the shifting, glistening surface of water, prismatic in the sunlight.

Its exploration of femininity as something both carnal and spiritual partners well with the album’s locked-down production process, one that saw Zoe take the reins on mixing and producing the album herself, moulding it as something truly her own and positioning herself as a boldly self-sufficient artist. Her peculiar brand of indie is freckled with soft, dreamy tones, rebranding it as her own, far away from the masculine currents of traditional indie rock.

It hosts mythic shades, mingling with an unapologetic modernity, like battered Nikes strung up in the branches of a tree in a drunken haze. The titular track ‘Monthly Friend’ has an understated stadium feel to it, the broad ambition of her soundscape rippling outwards and filling the space around you with its ambient, multi-layered qualities. It’s followed by the slow, beachy buoyancy of ‘Heal’, the track’s bounce tempered by the introspective nature of Zoe’s vocals.

The album is topped off by ‘The Void’, a fittingly cinematic finale that swells and ruptures in an almost sexual way. ‘Monthly Friend’ is like a mirror world, reflecting and refracting light everywhere in a sonic kaleidoscope. Zoe’s fairy-like vocals are foregrounded against her spinning, swirling guitar music, melding dream-pop and indie across a pastel-coloured sky. It’s an album that manifests a confidence that should have been there from the start, one that capitalises off the same femininity that has put so many down in a brash, joyful way.