Rhys Lewis - Things I Chose To Remember (2020) [Hi-Res]

In an intimate sanctuary of sound, Rhys Lewis finds a new home. While his poignant songwriting has racked up legions of loyal fans —and close to 300 million plays to date —the Oxfordshire-born artist has pushed his creativity to unforeseen new heights for his bewitching debut album Things I Chose To Remember. Lewis's superpower is to distil universal-feeling moments into his music with highly personal precision. Take recent single When Was The Last Time? which puts a unique twist on a break-up narrative by zeroing in on the excruciating period just before a couple’s tensions come to a head.

Things I Chose To Remember is a testament to an artist’s unleashed creativity, and stands as Lewis's most inventive and exploratory music to date. The use of synthesizers adds a looming, apocalyptic feeling to the album’s soaring closer What Wild Things Were, a vivid eco-conscious elergy to our burning planet which imagines mass animal extinctions, and was inspired by the American journalist David Wallace-Wells’s book-length imagining of the dire effects of climate change, The Uninhabitable Earth.

Under The Sun is a bright guitar-pop gem which begs for mass-singalongs at a summer festival, and What If is a soaring mea culpa in which Lewis's singing voice goes full-belt against swelling strings. Meanwhile, the gospel-inspired drama of Lonely Place is heralded by the rhapsodic sound of a full choir which is actually Lewis vocals filtered and effected.