Small touches weigh heavily on Astrid Sonne’s Great Doubt.
Across a minimal yet piercingly effective soundscape that constantly teeters between slight anxiety and nostalgic longing, Sonne ruminates on love, parenthood and the future.
While it shares a kindred spirit with the asymmetrical pop sounds of artists like Tirzah and ML Buch, Great Doubt is uniquely infused with Astrid Sonne’s compositional ear for classical arrangements. More than anything she understands how to use space and silence: when to punctuate it with flashes of cello or quivering drone, and when to let the song breathe with a single, affecting chord or arpeggio.
Astrid Sonne’s vision of bedroom pop is one where all instrumentals and touchpoints are on the table, whether it be deviations into spoken word, instrumental trip hop, or lumbering RnB. For an album built around uncertainty, Great Doubt is undoubtedly assured.
Words by Lindsay Riley