EAVES WILDER - Little Miss Sunshine

This is a debut that truly deserves attention: young London singer-songwriter Eaves Wilder spent recent months scattering more than promising singles across the streaming platforms, while also managing to land a deal with the ever-attentive Secretly Canadian.

The strength of "Little Miss Sunshine" — a self-mocking title, as she's keen to point out — lies unquestionably in the songwriting. Wilder shows real skill in crafting songs that hover between rock and pop songwriting, between a more or less sweetened roughness and rounded, catchy melodies (just listen to "Everybody Talks" and "Hurricane Girl") capable of winning over even someone like this writer, who isn't particularly drawn to this kind of thing.

If anything, it's surprising that the thoroughly English Eaves so often turns her gaze to a personal idea of America in which it's not hard to spot the long shadow of Lana Del Rey ("English Tea" comes close to emulation), albeit stripped of much of the underlying malice. The singles – aptly placed midway through the tracklist – "Mountain Sized" and "The Great Plains", the latter in some sense the summa of the whole record, are the clearest evidence of this.

Maybe not everything sails at the same level – "Just Say No!" and "LA", for instance, struggle a little to hold up against the rest of the material – but otherwise there's little to complain about: tracks like "Ropeburn", "Daisy Chain Reaction" and "Summer Rolls", all three remarkable, further tell the story of a "Hurricane Girl" with clear, winning ideas.

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18/05/2026