Alison’s back — and she’s flipping the script in a way that made me literally pause my wine pour and rewind. If you’ve heard “Light” or “Rhyme or Reason,” you probably remember that hazy, romantic acoustic pop space she carved out — soft-focus chords, lyrics that felt handwritten on the back of a love letter, the kind of stuff that lives in your chest for a while.
But “Often“? This is something else entirely.
At first, it plays it coy: a sweet, plucky ukulele, breezy and sun-drenched, the kind of intro that practically begs for a terrace, a sunset, and a glass of something chilled. You settle in. You think you know the vibe. And then out of nowhere, the floor drops — and you’re in this shimmering hyperpop world, euphoric synths, glitchy vocal layering, a beat that pulses more like a heartbeat than a drum track.
It’s a song about self-relationship — how we hold space for ourselves when things go sideways, and how joy can still erupt from that. There’s a kind of Björk-ian unpredictability baked into the production (yeah, I said it), especially in how the song shapeshifts without warning but still somehow lands with coherence. And the vocal? Alison goes there. She’s living it, breathing it out in real time, voice cracking open at the edges like she’s letting us in mid-thought.
This is the kind of track that makes you reassess what kind of artist you thought someone was. Like, you thought she was acoustic pop? Cute! Now she’s holding court somewhere between bedroom folk and whatever corner of the internet hyperpop crawled out of — and it works.
Put plainly: “Often” is a curveball, but a welcome one. It redefines her lane without burning the map. And if this is where Alison’s heading, I’m in — even if I have no clue what’s coming next.
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