Lanterns on the Lake

+ Cloth - There's a moment at the outset of Lanterns on the Lake's sixth studio album, "There's a Bird in My Ribcage", when singer and songwriter Hazel Wilde notices dust motes suspended in a shaft of light. An ordinary detail, easily overlooked in the relentless churn of everyday life. But Wilde is paying attention. "I used to shut it all out," she sings. "But I'm soaking it in now." By the album's close, that perspective has shifted dramatically: the Earth is a speck suspended in an indifferent universe. Between those two images lies a record about the beauty and weight of being alive to the world. Between the intimate and the immense, Lanterns on the Lake explore the lives closest to us, the suffering furthest from us, and the struggle to hold both in view at once. "The album is a refusal to go numb," says Wilde. "In a world that sometimes urges us to retreat into distraction, cynicism or performance, you find yourself aching for something more, and to hold on to something real." Written against a backdrop of division and desensitisation, the record insists on feeling deeply.