Lily Forte is engaged in what might be called an archaeology of feelings. “The Luckiest“ – her new single ahead of her debut album Don’t Gild The Lily (January 9) – operates in the territory of emotional ambiguity, where the past blurs to the point of becoming almost fiction. Forte works with this instability deliberately: her songs exist in the space between memory and its distortion, what we turn facts into when they cease to satisfy us.

“The Luckiest” deals with the sudden disappearance of someone from your life – a theme that’s banal right up until the moment Forte begins to sing. Her voice is immersed in a fog of reverb, processed in a way that makes it seem recorded in another decade, possibly in another reality. The vocals sound muted, with a slight roughness of a live performance, but the production is thoughtful enough to create the sensation of a smoke-filled bar somewhere on the outskirts of the 1950s. Forte has clearly studied Mazzy Star, early Beach House, possibly even Broadcast, but she’s smart enough to take only the texture from there, retaining her own melodic sensibility.

The arrangement is something between dark pop sound and indie rock, which bursts into the song’s structure with unexpected surges of guitar energy. Forte builds the track in layers: dream-pop synthesizers, a distanced rhythm section, guitars that appear and disappear, creating dynamics without aggression. Her vocals are straightforward enough for radio, but the production adds a layer of complexity that separates her from standard indie pop.

If Forte’s previous releases demonstrated her ability to work with atmosphere, then “The Luckiest” shows that she has learned to weave real songs into that atmosphere – with structure, dynamics, development. She avoids the obvious, even when working with pop form.

Don’t Gild The Lily comes out on January 9, and if the rest of the material maintains the standard of “The Luckiest”, Forte has a chance at one of the most cohesive debuts of the year. For now, she’s doing what rarely succeeds for artists on their first album: finding her own voice in an overcrowded genre, taking influences that could crush a less confident musician, and turning them into something of her own. The result sounds timeless in the best sense: impossible to date precisely, but absolutely relevant. Very compelling. Recommended!

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