More about: Billie Marten

Four albums into her career, Billie Marten is not reinventing herself. On Drop Cherries, Marten is instead, turning further inwards. Examining, musing, and ruminating on love, Marten makes introspection her own. 

Opening track ‘New Idea’ feels like a wistful entrance into the imaginative space of the album. Simple hums and guitar patterns build over the echoes of the tape recording, and you are lulled into Drop Cherries slowly and gracefully as the strings further pull you along. 

It is easy enough to get swept into Marten’s warm and swirling voice. I was more than happy to let the album drift through my headphones as a delightful piece of indie-folk music. But every now and then a particularly eloquent lyric, a chilling harmony or a wistful string melody would catch my attention and pull me deeper into the landscape of Drop Cherries. 

Once you are in, it feels like you have stumbled onto something truly enchanting. ‘God Above’ begins at once in the mundane assertion of ‘here I am as the toes on my feet’ but grows to poetic riffs on Romeo and Juliet’s first kiss. Bright and airy, the song feels ephemeral, as does much of the rest of the album. These songs feel like vignettes: brief moments of imagination or life captured and there for you to fully throw yourself into if you so desire. 

Drop Cherries is an album of an artist’s musings: ruminations on various facets of life and relationships. Single ‘I Can’t Get My Head Around You’, is a distinct stand out, encapsulating the entire album’s central point as Marten sings ‘I can’t get my head around you, and I can’t get enough.’

Reckoning with the often unanswerable, the album at times takes Marten towards the existential. Slower moments like ‘Acid Tooth’ feature beautifully delicate guitar patterns to back the lyrics ‘born anew every morning, coffee in the cup, questions with no answer, plastic in the gut.’ Equally, in ‘Arrow’, Marten lays her vulnerability out to bare, admitting ‘I’m at war with my shadow.’ 

"...an ever-changing tapestry of introspection."

For each unanswerable question, there are moments of brief clarity in the chaos of it all. From the live nature of instrumentation to the image of ‘two weeping willows throwing an arm to the other’, this is an album rooted firmly in fleetingly poetic moments of beauty.  ‘I Bend to Him’ offers one of the more intimate and stripped back songs on the album, and similarly, closing track ‘Drop Cherries’ concludes the album on this very note. The delicate guitar patterns lull along Marten’s vocals as she sings about the vulnerability of the simple act of offering your love to someone. 

Each song on Drop Cherries is a page to be turned, and in this sense, each offers a new story or perspective for you to get lost in with each listen. Drop Cherries is the album of an artist’s inner workings, a rare glimpse into the vulnerability of imagination, and an ever-changing tapestry of introspection.

Billie Marten features in issue 7, out now

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More about: Billie Marten