Eight years is a long time to be away from music when music is what made you. Gin Wigmore left after Ivory in 2018, relocated to the United States, ran a hotel in the California desert, raised two children through a marriage that eventually fell apart, and came back to New Zealand in 2024 to finish what became Beautiful Mess.

That context matters, but it matters in a specific way: the album absorbs all of it and refuses to be defined by any single piece. This is the thing that could have been a “comeback record” in the worst sense: earnest, explanatory, heavy with the weight of its own backstory. Instead it’s a record that sounds like someone who had things to say and finally had the space to say them. The difference between those two outcomes is the whole story.

What Wigmore has made here is genuinely unusual for a fourth album, especially one arriving after that kind of gap. Beautiful Mess splits itself in two with full conviction: Side A rooted in country and Americana, tender and soft, drawing from the lineage of Lucinda Williams and Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette; Side B ripping the record open with raw rock energy that escalates, by the album’s final track, into something heavier than most artists in Wigmore’s lane would attempt. The double-sided concept earns its conceit because both halves are fully committed rather than compromised toward each other. Wigmore gives you the gentleness completely before she gives you the chaos completely, and the result is a record that genuinely earns its title rather than wearing it as aesthetic.

The voice is the thread. Wigmore has always had a raspy, lived-in quality that makes her immediately recognizable, and on Beautiful Mess that quality has deepened into something more commanding. On Country Diamond, the album’s opening track, she sounds like she’s one sustained note away from losing the thread entirely, and that edge is the whole instrument. By Strangelove, the Side B standout, that same voice is anchoring full grunge terrain, and the fact that it works in both places is a demonstration of range that takes almost two decades to accumulate. Few artists sound this confident straddling Loretta Lynn and Kurt Cobain in the same session.

The album’s emotional intelligence is in how it sequences its emotional range rather than averaging it out. The decade Wigmore has been processing (love, divorce, motherhood, reinvention) could have been collapsed into a cohesive midtempo adult-alternative record and everyone would have understood. Instead the record externalizes the contradiction. The Beautiful and the Mess coexist the same way they coexist in a real life: separately, at full volume, sometimes in the same week. Rodeo, the pop-punk gut-punch on Side B, is ruthlessly funny about re-entering the dating world in your late thirties. Tip of My Tongue, from Side A, stays in acoustic suspension the whole way through, building tension that the song holds back from releasing. These are songs from opposite emotional planets.

For an artist who has been making records since the mid-2000s, Beautiful Mess has the energy of someone with something to prove, which is rarer than it sounds at this stage. Wigmore describes courage as the album’s central ingredient: “courage to be me, the courage to make music with vulnerability, the courage to try shit” and the music backs the claim. The record takes genuine risks in both directions: the country material is specific and emotionally exposed, and the rock material goes further into distortion and weight than her catalog has previously visited. Here Come The Girls closes the album at its most extreme point, the heaviest thing here, which is either the record’s boldest sequencing choice or its most obvious one depending on how you feel about endings. I land on bold.

Six New Zealand Music Awards. Over 630 million streams. Almost two decades of a career built on her own terms. And this is the record Gin Wigmore made after eight years away.

Part of what makes Beautiful Mess land the way it does is timing, and I mean that in a specific sense. The record arrives at a moment when the default mode for an artist returning after a long absence is to recalibrate toward the market — softer edges, cleaner production, something designed to re-enter playlists smoothly. Wigmore went the opposite direction. The album gets louder and stranger as it progresses, and the closing track is the most extreme thing on it. That’s a confidence call that very few artists make after a gap this long, and it says something about where she’s positioned herself: this record is for the people who were already there, and for anyone willing to follow where it goes. That’s a narrower target than playing it safe, and it’s a more interesting one.

That’s a version of courage harder to sustain than the first kind: the courage of someone who already proved themselves, stepping away, and choosing to come back on exactly her own terms. Beautiful Mess is what that sounds like.

*This review was made possible by SubmitHub