The Staves w/ Shallow Alcove at The Iron Horse on Thursday, November 7 2024
It was in December 2022 that The Staves celebrated the 10th anniversary of their debut album Dead & Born & Grown – a strange and beautiful period in the lives of sisters and band members Jessica, Camilla and Emily Staveley-Taylor, making their fourth album All Now with the same organic vulnerability as that first record: except now everything was different, and they kind of were too.
It began with Jess, navigating this new landscape by harnessing her creativity on her own at first in the studio in Hackney at the end of 2022, slowly luring Camilla back to the next chapter of The Staves, before reaching out to super-producer John Congleton (Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen), who the band had worked with on Good Woman, to help them figure out the next step in the studio. “After this feeling of slow motion for a couple of years, it suddenly accelerated wildly towards the finish line,” the band say of the weeks that follow: packing up and heading to LA to meet Congleton and musicians Max Hart and Tamir Barzilay to bring to life what this next album really could be.
The result? An album as rich and honest as all the most profound music by The Staves scattered across albums for the last decade, calcified here into something special. There’s the buoyant nostalgia on ‘After School’, a love letter to Emily from her little sisters “looking back on the simpler times” and reflecting on those teenage days shuffling into that one bedroom with the CD player to play the new Sheryl Crow album. “That late ‘90s period was just fucking fun,” says Camilla. “We thought Emily was the coolest, so we thought we may as well go full throttle with a really joyful song.”
That sense of self-rediscovery blooms fully on the album’s title track, a distillation of the cacophony of our modern society, understanding the overwhelming nature of just trying to get through it all, but accepting it and not shying away. The song came quick and fast for Camilla and Jess: “These are things running through your head that you really need to say and get out.” Musically it’s majestic, a steady pulsating beast that grows until the tension is almost too much and suddenly, a release.
Much of the strength of All Now comes from the piercing vocal and harmonic clarity, the humble elements that have always made The Staves who they are, only with the years of experience and growth to take their writing to the next level. “You got the magic I think I missed it / Homesick for a place that never existed,” they sing on ‘I Don’t Say It, But I Feel It’ a track that “shakes itself out of being too soppy”, at once speaking to the grounded mode of writing (acoustic guitar and vocals) and exploring a driving force to take charge of these difficult emotions.
