Elanor Moss - The Knife, The Needle

Recording her debut full-length album The Knife, The Needle was a healing process for Elanor Moss, who found herself adrift after touring on two EPs, Citrus (2022) and Cosmic (2023). That period saw Moss shifting her sound, experimenting with new genres and pitching her lyrics toward bombast. “Nothing felt right,” she recalls, “so I took the pressure off myself and tried to calibrate my relationship with songwriting and music.” The three years she spent writing The Knife, The Needle ultimately found her returning to her roots in and love for, as she puts it, “the music that made me really feel something; the music I wanted to be writing.”

“These were folk and contemporary folk songwriters,” she continues. “I spent a lot of time playing the guitar. I borrowed a four-track tape machine and demoed songs on it. I also started therapy again, where I was beginning to unpack my understanding of where I come from, how my family history plays out in the things I do and how I love and receive love. Out of the slowness and quiet of those rhythms came these songs.”

“Sarah Waiting in the Car” sets the tone, with Moss’ delicate, contemplative guitar playing and the brushstrokes of Matthew Herd’s ensemble — Marcus Hamblett (horn), Jool Owen (horn), Andrew Stuart-Buttle (Violin), Reid Jenkins (Violin), Linus Fenton (double bass), and Herd (saxophone) — embellishing her lyrics with heart-rending gravitas as the narrative spilling out of Moss turns from a meeting at the bar to the aftermath of an abusive relationship, gentleness turning into violence.

The Knife, The Needle concerns itself with the way relationships are transformed, complicated, and troubled by love. In “Fixer” Moss grapples with the fact that love is as capable of harming someone as it is healing them. Its chorus, “I’m afraid that if you show me the knife / I might use it on you babe” shifts to something else entirely: “Maybe what we thought of as a knife / Is just a needle we could use / To stitch the wound?”

It’s devastating work, at once patient and vulnerable, opulently rendered and keenly felt. The Knife, The Needle emerged from a place of restraint, with Moss — staying at a cabin near her parent’s house in the Scottish highlands after initially recording a different version of the album in New York City — feeling the pangs of the album she hadn’t recorded — “quieter, weirder, more English.” Rerecording with a new ensemble and producer/engineer Pete Miles was a risk — not only was she putting aside a completed project, but the quieter, weirder, more English sound manifested by her second attempt at The Knife, The Needle is utterly revelatory, both of Moss’ talent and the wounds she and her subjects carry. It was worth it: both objects named in the album’s title are capable of drawing blood, but illuminated by her voice and guitar, what bleeds out from the wounds she shares here is nothing short of poetry.

For fans of Vashti Bunyan, Jessica Pratt, Gillian Welch, Laura Marling, Adrienne Lenker, Joanna Newsom, Sibylle Baier, Tim Buckley, Nico, Daughter, Weyes Blood, Judee Sill