Eliza Shaddad - Future (2018)

Eliza Shaddad’s highly-anticipated debut album Future is released on Beatnik Creative. Co-produced and recorded in the same studio in remote Devon where she worked on her Run and Waters EPs with Mercury-nominated longtime collaborator Chris Bond, Eliza Shaddad’s highly anticipated debut long player Future was two years in the making and a deeply candid look into the unique songwriting mind of its creator. It’s a deeply personal work, as singles This Is My Cue and My Body attest to. The first is a subtle and penetrating look at the ambivalence in our relationships after the passion cools off, where the latter deals with Eliza’s need for solitude despite the betrayals of her own body. Each song is based around a highly-fleshed out psychological idea, making Future a sonic journal that fishes into the vast pools of her past and present to reveal a songwriting voice that’s fundamentally human in its everyday relatability. Set on the bedrock of Eliza’s early folk and grunge influences, it revels in “flavours of trip- hop, West-Coast surf sounds, 80’s chorus, 90’s movie soundtracks, and all-out pop” while still managing to sound like a focused, devastatingly precise and cohesive body of work.

Equally at home in dusty libraries perusing Scottish murder ballads and Arabic scales Eliza Shaddad’s singular artistry is the product of an incredibly diverse and borderless upbringing. Born to Sudanese and Scottish parents and raised across seven countries, she is the descendent of a long line of progressive artists and academics dating back to the 1800s. Future is a sound honed by a woman who has striven to reassert herself through multiple national identities, academic fields, and musical cultures. But Eliza confesses she is not the first woman in her family to have had such an experience. Coming from a family of matriarchal over-achievers, she is simply the daughter who has picked music as her path through life, and she’s rapidly reaping the rewards, gaining widespread critical acclaim and radio support for her releases thus far. On debut LP Future she is asserting her true self-hood. And by the sounds of it, she’s doing it with startling, but wholly expected