Maria Somerville’s “Luster” Is A Hypnotic Homecoming for Ages
With Luster, Maria Somerville creates a sound that feels like home. Released on April 25th, this spellbinding full-length finds the Irish artist at her most sonically expansive and emotionally distilled. Drawing inspiration from her Conneramard homeland, Somerville crafts a sonic landscape that intertwines with ethereal shoegaze textures with introspectives of folk and ambient music.
Written in a house on the banks of Lough Corrib, Luster is rooted in return not only to a physical place, but to versions of that singer that she has been quietly mapping through music for nearly a decade. Her earlier work was long for home, but Luster feels inhabited. From the opening notes of tracks like “Mayfly” to the windswept closer “October Moon,” she invites fans into a liminal space where memory is out of reach, and that distance is the point.
In “Projections,” Somerville’s production cradles lyrics that feel like a journal entry that has been left out in the rain. “Dreaming of different paths / All my love for you is not /Hanging on to something else / It’s not so real / I pretend I know I’m not good / I know I’m not bad / Too many stories, what I am, what I’m not.” There’s a weightless pain to these lyrics, the kind that doesn’t beg for pity but for a quiet confession. This track is about perception, how we see others, how we see ourselves and the blurry line between those two. Somerville captures the ache of being misunderstood and the deeper ache of not understanding yourself.
In a goth-folk romance, the track “Violet” is an emotionally ambiguous track on the album. “Burden of life / Life is love / Love is time / Time is love / So many things in the air” are lyrics that capture Somerville’s cliché. Somerville’s voice is just-woken, and has the softness of someone speaking to themselves more than to you, and maybe that’s the point. This track is less about articulation and more about atmosphere. The lyrics don’t need to be fully understood to be felt, and that’s the magic of Luster as a whole.
These songs contain an image that follows that are as vivid as the lyrics are vaporous. Somerville never separates her interior world from her environment, she weaves them together like moss and stone. The track “Corrib” is a quiet love song to the landscape that shadows her home, echoing with pastel-hued pads and field recordings.
Somerville maintains presence in these tracks, she never vanishes from her songs; she just sinks deeper into them. Her compositions are deliberate and radiantly sad. This record is built from gestures and ghosts, but its emotional core is steady. It isn’t content to sound beautiful, it insists on meaning something. Maria Somerville has made an album that doesn’t just capture a feeling, but rather is the feeling. With Luster, she doesn’t just return to herself, she brings us with her.
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