On April 7th, and at only 23 years old, Billie Marten is set to release her fourth album: Drop Cherries, via Fiction Records. A remarkable achievement. Cosily intimate, yet vastly expansive, on Drop Cherries, Marten rediscovers the intimacy of her earlier work, something that had been put to the wayside with her last release: the critically lauded Flora Fauna (2021).
Where Flora and Fauna was an abrupt shift of sound and a flail for footing after being dropped by her previous label, Drop Cherries feels closer to a milestone on the road in a tried and tested direction. Despite the slight inconsistencies in the quality of production and the at times frustratingly fleeting nature of some of the album’s most sonically pleasing moments, with Drop Cherries Marten is firmly planting her feet into the suburbs of greatness, even if she hasn’t quite reached that destination yet.
Opening track ‘New Idea’ gently lowers us into the scene. A 2:44 mood setter, packed with signature husky vocal harmonies yet devoid of lyrics. Marten is reminding us who we are listening to, but not yet deigning to give away what form this new idea of hers might take. It serves as the first in a collection of vignettes that tell the story of the many faces of a romantic relationship, “I’m simply searching for clarity.” says Marten, “I’m re-examining the same feelings I had when I first started writing: I feel different to others, so I’ll write about what that’s like and see if I can work out why that is.”
After a sizable slice of palette-cleansing silence, Marten drops us into ‘God Above’, an album standout and a clear statement on just what kind of a project Drop Cherries is going to be. This is the Billie Marten of her much beloved first two releases; Feeding Seahorses by Hand (2019) and Writing of Blues and Yellows (2016), but this time she’s got company. Where those early works were defined by the uncomplicated yet honest combination of Billie and Guitar (with the occasional flourish of keys), Drop Cherries brings aboard strings, woodwind, and a healthy dollop of honky tonk; a truly welcome development that is – if anything – employed too sparingly.
Recorded entirely on tape, Drop Cherries marks a first foray into analog production for Marten, a choice that sees her join a growing list of names across the arts to ditch digital production in favour of something more tangible and physically realised. It’s probably no coincidence that this occurred on the first project that she has written and also co-produced (alongside Dom Monks), and It’s precisely as a result of this move to take more complete ownership of a project with a larger scope and more moving parts that Marten has succeeded in crafting something able to exist simultaneously as both intimate and expansive.
At times this shift to the analog can become a subtle distraction, but for the most part, however, it feels like a natural and justified choice. On ‘Just Us’, the vocals have a wonderful hollowness to them. There’s the odd satisfying pop and scratch here and there, snares sound beautifully crisp and the strings are afforded added depth. With ‘I Bend To Him’, we are gifted some minimally accompanied and haunting vocals that sound as though they are coming straight from a gramophone; and on ‘Nothing but Mine’, we get some wonderfully ponderous and stumbling honky-tonk keys, emulating the drunk wobbling of an intoxicating infatuation.
This minor inconsistency is also present within Marten’s employment of her newfound accompaniment. Every time we are bathed in strings I’m left wishing for just a bit more substance. On ‘Willow’, the entrance of the woodwind is majestic, but it fades as soon as it arrives and is quickly relegated to a place hovering just beneath Marten’s vocals. The same can be said of Drop Cherries’ titular and concluding track, a piece whose firm root in Marten’s past illustrates exactly where Drop Cherries is lacking. While its purposeful development of keys alongside some soothing guitar artfully frames what is some of Marten’s best songwriting on the album, it once again neglects the wider instrumentation that elevates some of the other tracks on the album to new highs.
There are such flashes of brilliance here, but the inconsistency and unwillingness to truly embrace the ethos that Marten set out for Drop Cherries makes me wonder just how good this could have been if only she had listened to her own words. “Dropping cherries,” she says, “is such a strong, visceral image that I tried to channel throughout recording in Somerset and Wales, to capture the vibrancy, unpredictability, and occasional chaos one experiences within a relationship”. Vibrant, and at times unpredictable: yes. But occasional chaos? Unfortunately sparingly so.
Words by Rory Jamieson
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