Fine lyrics and delicate arrangements carry Flora Hibberd’s music through modular synths, brass, and hushed guitars.
With Flora Hibberd, prehistory is not a museum but a living material: ghosts rise from the past to mingle with the tremors of the present. Yet here the tumult remains too neatly tethered. After the folk warmth of Swirl (2025), this second album shifts texture and grows denser. Produced by Ben Lanz (Beirut, The National), these ten songs move between modular synths, brass, and hushed guitars, with a precision that does not exclude emotion.
Ache, where the voice of Sufjan Stevens blends in, and Deltaplane (performed with Kate Stables and Lonny) sketch two facets, between electric tension and a broader departure. On Shelley, the pedal steel of Stew Crookes and the harmonies of J.E. Sunde add to this odd theatre of silhouettes and ghosts.
Voices respond to one another as if in a mirror
Flora Hibberd knows how to braid her songs: the arrangements are delicate, the lyrics refined, the voices respond to one another as in a mirror. The whole is precise and shows real organic density. But this sophistication is also the album’s limit.
Through such precision, Mammoth sometimes seems to hold back what it could release. One would like more friction, more accidents, more outbursts. Ultimately, Flora Hibberd only lacks a touch of disorder: to let this beautiful machinery derail a little so that her songs bite more.
Mammoth (22Twenty/Redeye). Out on October 16. On tour at MaMA Music & Convention, Paris, on October 16 and at the Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, on April 27, 2027.
