With Want, Esther Rose takes the confessional candor of 2023’s Safe to Run and sets it against a bolder, more dynamic backdrop. Where her earlier work leaned toward sparse intimacy, this fifth album embraces a full-band sound and richer textures, with contributions from members of Video Age, The Deslondes, and Silver Synthetic giving the songs added weight and color. It’s a record that balances self-examination with musical expansion, proving Rose can push her sound forward without losing the plainspoken honesty that defines her writing.
The title track opens the album with a deceptively simple acoustic strum, gradually swelling into a layered folk-rock anthem that frames Rose’s push-pull desires—domesticity versus independence, privacy versus recognition. That tension runs throughout the record. Had To spins a spirited rhythm into a meditation on drinking and its false comforts, while Ketamine threads edgy guitars through lyrics comparing healing remedies with doomed romance. By the time New Bad arrives near the end, Rose and her band are knee-deep in shoegaze haze, buzzing guitars surrounding her voice like storm clouds breaking open. It’s one of her most daring songs to date, and arguably the record’s peak.
But Want doesn’t live solely in distortion and volume. Color Wheel pares things back to a haunted piano ballad, its echoing chords and piercing simplicity standing in stark contrast to the rowdier tracks. Scars, featuring Dean Johnson, darkens the mood with a hushed duet that aches with melancholy. Even quieter moments like Messenger and The Clown carry Rose’s signature wit and observational sharpness, whether in the raw repetition of the former or the world-weary humor of the latter.
The album closes with Want Pt. 2, a companion to the opener that strips things down to a cappella beginnings before unfolding into a slow, mantra-like sing-along. It’s a fitting conclusion—Rose acknowledging her contradictions while letting her voice rise above the noise.
Want may not have the pristine focus of Safe to Run, but that’s partly the point. It’s looser, riskier, sometimes ragged, and all the more compelling for it. Rose is wrestling openly with change—sobriety, therapy, questions of self and purpose—and the result is an album that’s less about perfection than about process. She has widened her sonic palette without abandoning her storytelling, crafting a record that’s as vulnerable as it is confident.
If Safe to Run felt like a breakthrough, Want feels like an artist digging deeper, daring herself to keep moving forward. And in that push for more—more sound, more honesty, more risk—Esther Rose has given us one of her most engaging albums yet. – Jason Felton
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