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LAURA REZNEK
The Sewing Room(Mary Yelling)
Add date: 5.6.2025
Release date: 4.25.2025
How do we make sense of the past while staying alive to the present? How do we reconstruct our own worlds after they've been upended by loss?
On Laura Reznek's raw and exacting new album, The Sewing Room, the Canada-born/UK-based singer-songwriter takes an unflinching look at the ways grief and joy function not as binary opposites but as companion states.
Portalling listeners through deeply personal storytelling paired with an organic, DIY aesthetic, Laura's newest album is a feat of honesty and self-possession. Sharpening the blade of melancholy into something more active, more useful, Laura casts back through the familial characters of her life with a tenderness afforded by time. "I cut my teeth in those dark alleyways/Oh how could I have been so easily swayed?" she sings with the advantage of retrospect.
Influences such as Nick Drake and Judee Sill ring strong as Laura's latest accomplishes what few can: it stares loss in the face without being consumed by it. This album reminds us that we are vast enough to feel everything in unison — that there is no Before or After when it comes to grief, because love evades linearity. That our strength comes not through overcoming hurt but by staying curious to the ways we inevitably affect each other.
The Sewing Room asks: What does it mean to have put your trust in the wrong places? What does it mean to pull out the sutures of what you've learned and recreate your own understanding of the world?
The album draws on Laura's strengths from her previous successes; the lyrical depth of Agrimony (2021) can be found in the evocative lyrics and introspection. But the sound here is uniquely organic – in part because Laura recorded most of it solo in her home in the UK countryside. For an album that explores how we reclaim our own understanding of our lives, it feels potent that Laura has touched nearly all parts of the album, conjuring soundscapes through guitar, violin, analog synths, and on the piano she inherited from her patrilineal grandma, Zelda. Her sound is bolstered by an array of friends: Cellist Sam Rowe arranged the strings, multi-tracked live in a country church in Laura's village; Daniel Baxter on guitar; Martin Newbury on drums; with Danny Cross on bass and the album’s mixing engineer. Together with Laura's dexterous vocal range, each song swells into something nearly epiphanic. Through the grief of each scene, joy can't help but burst through.
Listeners of Nick Drake, Fiona Apple, Adrianne Lenker, and Allegra Krieger will feel at home in Laura's lyrical poeticism that is carried by an equally impressive musical prowess.
The Sewing Room is an acute generosity – one that portals listeners through the full range of emotions that come part-and-parcel with being human.