Squirrel Flower - Contact Sports (Deluxe Edition) (2018)

Squirrel Flower (Ella Williams) has been a busy woman. Born in the American MidWest, she has spent her 21 years playing in orchestras, singing in choruses, recording albums, performing shows and taking on numerous art projects. When it comes to debut EP Contact Sports, she’s made music videos, recorded the music, tour managed herself and made all the artwork in collaboration with friends. Relationships are the central theme to Contact Sports – the songs are lyrically astute, and the tracks cover the intimate tussle of love. Lead single Conditions rises with full guitars before descending into a cathartic breakdown, whilst Daylight Savings is a euphoric blast of dizzy energy. Not Your Prey veers between sparse instrumentation to searing potency, and Final track On Being Alone is a stripped back meditation on times gone by. There’s certainly a formula to the tracks, with each having a few tectonic shifts, but it seems to work. Those hours of work have paid off.