Somewhere around the fourth listen of Undecided, I caught myself doing something I rarely do with acoustic-leaning records anymore: I rewound a track not because I missed a lyric, but because I wanted to hear the exact moment the guitar shifts register in Innocently Guilty. That tiny mechanical gesture — thumb on the scrub bar, dragging left — felt like the most honest review I could give. But you probably want sentences, so here we go.

Cam Elise writes from a place that feels deceptively simple. A voice, a guitar, emotions that skew confessional. The template is ancient, and frankly, it’s a template that tends to flatten women’s work into “singer-songwriter” shorthand while granting men the courtesy of being called “artists.” What Undecided does well — and it does this almost immediately, from the opening seconds of Sign — is reject the gentleness that acoustic production often imposes on female vocalists. The protest is there, unmistakable, but it never tips into the theatrics of capital-R Rock. Elise sounds like someone arguing with conviction at a kitchen table, not someone performing outrage on a stage. The distinction matters.

photo by Jenna Leigh

Sign announces this with a directness I didn’t expect. The vocal sits right up front, almost uncomfortably close, and the guitar work behind it carries this restless, slightly chilly energy — like late-autumn courtyard sessions where everyone’s too stubborn to go inside. I keep thinking about why this track works as an opener: it promises rebellion but delivers something closer to clarity. That’s a harder trick than it sounds.

Two tracks in the middle of the record — The Prodigy and Not Your Fault — operate in a quieter register, and I want to talk about them together because they share a quality I find genuinely difficult to name. The Prodigy loosens the tension that Sign establishes; there’s a reflective warmth to it, a sense of sitting with people who already understand you, where vulnerability costs nothing. Not Your Fault then reintroduces mystery — Elise‘s voice drops into something veiled, half-revealed, and the production pulls back just enough to make you lean in. Whether the sequencing here is deliberate architecture or happy accident, the emotional movement between the two tracks feels earned. I lean toward deliberate.

Now — Innocently Guilty. This is where the record finds its highest gear. The energy shifts sharply, and Elise sounds genuinely unleashed in a way the earlier tracks only hinted at. There’s a ferocity here that coexists with tenderness, which is a combination that usually collapses into one or the other. It doesn’t collapse here. The production stays lean — no orchestral reinforcements, no layered backing vocals swooping in to signal “this is the big moment.” The bigness comes entirely from her voice and a kind of rhythmic insistence in the guitar that borders on percussive. I played this one for a friend who mostly listens to post-punk, and his response was “wait, that’s acoustic?” — which felt like the right compliment.

Toxicity pushes into riskier territory, and I’m honestly less certain about my read on it. The lyrical framing — swimming deliberately into something dangerous, ignoring the warning signs — could easily veer into cliché. On first listen, I thought it did. By the third, I’d changed my mind. There’s a self-awareness in Elise‘s delivery that rescues the concept; she doesn’t romanticize the danger so much as acknowledge that sometimes self-determination and self-destruction share a zip code. The guitar tone here is heavier, murkier than elsewhere on the record, and it suits the mood, though I wonder if a slightly drier mix might have given the vocal even more room.

photo by Jenna Leigh

I want to circle to something broader before reaching the end of the tracklist. Undecided carries a strong aesthetic fingerprint of the ’90s — that era’s particular faith in the unadorned voice as a sufficient instrument of meaning. But Elise filters it through production choices that feel genuinely contemporary: layered acoustic effects, subtle spatial manipulation, moments where the reverb opens up and then snaps shut. The nostalgia never curdles into pastiche. It’s the difference between wearing your mother’s leather jacket because it fits and wearing it as a costume.

Preoccupied, the penultimate track, finds Elise at her most contemplative — which is not the same as her most passive. The lyrical mode shifts from statement to something resembling prayer, or maybe demand disguised as prayer. There’s a specific quality to her voice here that I associate with performers who’ve spent real time alone with their material, singing into empty rooms before anyone else heard it. Whether that’s biographical truth or just effective performance, I can’t say. Either way, it works.

The title track closes the record, and it functions as a kind of resolution without ever becoming conclusive — which feels exactly right for an album called Undecided. The folk influences that have been threading through the entire project surface most clearly here, and Elise‘s vocal carries a forward momentum that reframes the preceding nine tracks as deliberation rather than wandering. She sounds like someone who has, in fact, decided — but wants you to understand the weight of getting there.

I’ve spent a week with this record, and the thing that sticks with me isn’t any single track or production choice. It’s the consistency of perspective. Cam Elise has built ten songs around a sensibility that manages to be both defiant and intimate without those qualities canceling each other out. The acoustic palette could have been limiting; instead, it functions as discipline. Everything extraneous has been stripped away, and what remains is a voice — in every sense of that word — that doesn’t ask permission to take up space. In a landscape crowded with artists performing vulnerability, Elise simply practices it. That’s a rarer thing than it should be.

*This review was made possible by SubmitHub