FEEO - Goodness

There are cramped little recesses where it's best not to linger, places of the mind wrapped in a fog of grey, gloomy brooding, polaroids scattered face-down on the floor like memories to be painstakingly pieced back together, one by one. And yet it's precisely here that "Goodness" rises up as a solitary bastion over the badlands of ambient singer-songwriting - an album released, fittingly, under AD 93, the independent London imprint that has long been putting out the cryptic work of a diverse collective of souls operating at the margins of the industry. But while labelmates like Moin, james K and Martha Skye Murphy already blur every boundary between acoustic songcraft and electr(on)ic noise, Theodora Laird, aka feeo, now offers a listen that's if anything even more enigmatic, only partly illuminated by melody - much like the mysterious photo on the cover.

Don't expect big rhythmic upheavals or strong emotional swings: if anything, this record settles under the skin like tiny ink stains, often barely visible yet indelible. With a whispered but richly nuanced voice, sparse drum-machine beats, endless drones and the odd line of piano or rustic guitar, the eleven tracks on "Goodness" assemble postmodern anxieties and sorrows with a care that borders on moving.

It's easy to lose the thread in an instant, at least on first listen; "Days Pt.1" opens with a dark poem recited by actor Trevor Laird (who appeared in "Babylon" and "Quadrophenia"), before quickly drifting into the spectral, droning waltz of "The Mountain", then over the rough, circling synths - in Astrid Sonne fashion - of "Requiem", a track fleshed out with a bed of trombone courtesy of Caius Williams, or better still in the desolate singing of "Win!", one of the most intense moments on the tracklist.

Ever-present yet never intrusive - indeed capable of building tension with the barest of breaths - feeo slips into her own songs almost by accident, and yet it takes so little for her to stand out as a songwriter: on "Sandpit", for instance, her bare voice appears wrapped in an infinite tenderness, while across the expansive "Here" you can hear the full spectrum of a Beth Gibbons.

But the devil is in the details, whether it's some brief free jazz drum idea in the style of keiyaA on “The Hammer Strikes The Bell,” or when “The Night Forgives Those Black As Her” turns into an industrial collage in the vein of fellow Londoner Klein. For the gorgeous acoustic closer “There Is No I,” a liquid, oblique slide grazes the border between L'rain and Niecy Blues.

“Goodness,” in short, may leave listeners puzzled—a listen that's certainly symptomatic of various modern alternative trends, yet at the same time far too muted and hard to pigeonhole among the usual hype of the avant-garde underground. And yet it's precisely in this drowsy state that the record takes shape, little by little, in the ears of the more patient listener, expressing an intimacy one almost hates to disturb, but which also feels like a genuine emotional need.

Without any haste or need to make noise, feeo has crafted one of the most distinctive debuts of 2025.

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20/01/2026