Gabrielle Aplin is set to release her new album ‘Phosphorescent’ on January 13th. Recently previewed by the new single ‘Call Me’, her fourth studio album to date marks a fresh back-to-basics approach as she continues a career which has already seen her amass over a billion streams. The album is now available to pre-order / pre-save HERE, and is launched alongside a new stripped back piano version of ‘Call Me’.
‘Phosphorescent’ is not a lockdown album, but it is the product of the solitude and strangeness that Gabrielle, like so many of us, experienced throughout that time. She admits that she struggled to find her voice during the first national lockdown, but by the time of the second lockdown in the winter of 2020 her circumstances had changed. She had moved to Somerset with her partner and the two touring musicians anchored in a conventional schedule for the first time in forever, while the animals and wildlife that surrounded her new home reinvigorated her mojo.
Gradually, Gabrielle discovered that she was writing songs with a new-found liberation. Often accompanied only by her dog, her creativity returned to the purity she had enjoyed back when she started out. There were no external influences from the industry and she made no firm plans as to what topics she would write about. She had a blank slate.
She says, “I was writing again for fun. I was purely expressing myself with no brief. No-one was telling me what to do, in fact I didn’t have to do anything. At the start there was no goal, but as the songs started emerging I could see that they were about things I’d never really processed until that time. I think a lot of people didn’t really stop until the pandemic forced them, and that was definitely the case for me. A lot of them were addressing things I’d put off until then. It really made me question who I was when everything was stripped away.”
While ‘Phosphorescent’ emerged in a challenging time, it’s ultimately the strongest representation yet of who Gabrielle Aplin really is – as well as the artist that she is going to be in the years to come.
“It felt like I was making an album for the first time,” she concludes. “The recording process really felt just so natural. It was great for me because it made me really get to know myself as to who I am right now, considering so much has changed. I just want people to connect to it in whatever way possible. I hope they can get as much from listening to it as I got from making it.”
Comments are closed.