Going into Lizzy McAlpine’s album “Angel,” I was really scared. Not because I thought it was going to be bad, but because I knew what I was getting myself into. McAlpine has done me dirty too many times to count. Her music has a way of finding every emotion I don’t want to think about and stretching them across an entire song.
As a result, I was shocked when the first four songs of “Angel” were not as sad as I had prepared for. It felt like a trick. Apart from the first single, “The Light in the Painting,” which coincidentally happened to be the first single released from this album, its second track, “Anybody’s Fool,” sets the scene, with McAlpine sounding conversational as she moves through the song. Then comes “I Have a Friend,” a beautiful, romantic song that feels less like a love song and more like a warning. It’s the kind of song that makes you think, okay, this is going to get sad.
“The Moon” only reinforces that feeling. There is something almost painfully beautiful about the way
McAlpine describes love and dependence, particularly when she sings about being no freer than the moon. As angelic as the song is, there is already something uneasy underneath it.
Then comes “Ugly Things.”
Four songs in, I had started to regret what I had gotten myself into. I knew exactly where the song was going, and somehow that made it worse. “Ugly Things” moves between anger, regret, and the kind of love that you wish you could unlearn. When she sings about wishing someone had made her not love them, while also wishing they had loved her too, there is something especially painful about the contradiction. She is not simply angry at someone for hurting her; she is angry that she loved them enough for it to hurt in the first place. And then, after everything, comes the “I’m sorry.” Of course it does. McAlpine had already done enough damage.
Thankfully, “Soldier of the Road” gives the album some breathing room. And by breathing room, I mean McAlpine casually decided to put Fleet Foxes on the album. The harmonies make the song feel almost expansive compared to the intimacy of the songs before it. It is one of the moments where Angel reminds you that it’s not just a sad album. There’s a lot of beauty in it, even when the subject matter is anything but beautiful.
“Peach” takes that beauty somewhere else entirely. The song feels caught between two versions of McAlpine: the person people see and the person who exists outside of being an artist. There is something strange about being perceived as something almost otherworldly while still being a person who has friends, family, memories, and people who can hurt you. It is a tension that seems to run throughout “Angel.” McAlpine is an artist, but the album, like the majority of her music, reminds us that there is a person underneath all that.
That person becomes increasingly clear in “Over Country.” This was the first song that made me stop thinking about McAlpine and start thinking about myself. All I could think about during the song was my family and friends back home. It became a vessel for my own memory. I could hear what McAlpine was singing about, but I was thinking of my own life instead.
“Two Elevens” continues this feeling, but with a different kind of sadness. The song is not looking to assign blame. There was love once, and now there isn’t, and sometimes that is all there is to say. There is something remarkably mature about admitting that both people can have been hurt without either person being entirely responsible. Not every relationship needs a villain. Sometimes people change, sometimes they grow apart, and sometimes all you can do is acknowledge that there was love there and move forward.
“Our Stranger Ways” takes that distance and makes it audible. The distortion at the end of the song feels almost disorienting, especially against the intimacy of the rest of the album. It is as if the familiarity of another person is slowly becoming something unrecognizable. By this point, “Angel” is less concerned with the dramatic ending of a relationship and more interested in what happens afterward, when you are left trying to understand what that person means to you now.
This idea continued through “Mason’s Song,” which made me think about my friends, and “The Crowd,” which immediately made me think, no, absolutely not, we are not doing daddy issues now. Unfortunately, we were. The album keeps expanding its definition of love beyond romance, moving through friendship, family, childhood, and the people who shape us without necessarily staying in our lives forever. In a way, McAlpine makes these relationships feel interconnected, as if every person we love leaves something behind whether we want them to or not.
By the time the title track, “Angel,” starts playing, the album feels almost like a full circle. The image of a “hologram in neon light” captures something that has been present throughout the album: the tension between being seen and being known. A hologram looks real without being something you can touch. In an album so concerned with memory, relationships, and the different versions of ourselves that exist in other people’s minds, it feels fitting.
I went into “Angel” expecting Lizzy McAlpine to make me sad. She did, obviously. I knew she would. What I didn’t expect was for the album to make me think less about her experiences and more about my own. “Angel” is full of heartbreak, but it is not really an album about heartbreak. It is about what remains after it: the people you remember, the people you lose, the people you grow away from, and the parts of yourself that you find in all of them.
Unfortunately, McAlpine has once done me dirty once again.
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