AVALON EMERSON - Written Into Changes

Many artists use the side project as a way of drawing a clean line between two styles: Avalon Emerson, however, goes in the opposite direction. The American producer has managed to strike the right distance between her dancefloor-oriented productions and her more markedly pop-leaning work without resorting to aliases or subterfuge. She's relegated the releases that straddle the countless tech house subgenres to the Ep format, while on her full-length albums she's opted for a more narrative kind of storytelling, built on song structure. It's a distinction she'd already adopted on her 2023 debut album "& The Charm", whose strength lay in balancing DJ-style beat programming with indietronic melody.

With "Written Into Changes" that distinction goes even further, now completely untethered from the rigid dictates of the four-to-the-floor beat and fully devoted to the bright circuitry of alternative. These are clear, welcoming songs that, right from the title, declare their intention to move away from something that, intuitively, translates into the baggy scene. The result is a collection of catchy tracks that alternate cheerful melodies with darker lyrics, as in "Happy Birthday" and the line "Too young to die/ Too old to break through".

Her Berghain pedigree comes through above all in the refinement of the synths, which, having left their past behind, don't quite seem to find a new home either — mostly because the overall arrangement is too dense to belong to indie territory, yet too sparse to be outright pop. It's a crossroads that, in the first half of the record, proves intriguing and yields several potential hits, but in the second half gives way to one filler track after another. It's a period of change, as Emerson herself has stated.

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13/04/2026