Brace yourself to bask in the dark, sorrowful beauty of A.A. Williams‘s Solstice.
Release Date: June 5, 2026 | Reigning Phoenix Music | Website | Instagram
Last week, I completed another trip around the sun. I’m at the point in my life now where these birthdays don’t so much represent another step towards an endless, unknown future as it is just another proverbial brick in the wall. You get to a point, in terms of aging, that one year is just like the other, and the unpredictability of life gives way to a kind of energy-numbing complacency. That’s not meant to be depressing, which it certainly is, but more to offer an observation of life at its most mundane. At some point, you stop looking forward, and start looking backward, and if you didn’t have regrets before, you certainly do now.
So I suppose it’s apt that I spent the first few weeks listening to A.A. Williams‘s accomplished, confident new album Solstice backwards. As an old man who taps his phone with an angry index finger as opposed to two, well, opposable thumbs, exporting the files from Dropbox to Apple Music was more than my calcified neurons could take. So I’d sit back, put on the epic doom of final song “The Gentle Harm” and then work my way backwards to the self-assured confidence of opener and lead single “Poison”. And while this may seem like an affront to the artistic process, it was eye-opening in a lot of ways, like watching the natural progression of life unfold from the now to then. It’s through reflection that we can make sense of our own lived experiences, and Solstice revels in this reflective energy, a slow, majestic emerging of a life lived at its most impassioned edges.
A.A. Williams has made an album so full of earth-swallowing sorrow and pain that it feels as if the music itself embodies the vicious cycle of life. Even to call it a “cycle” is probably a disservice to reality. I’m under no illusion that my life will go on. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, most certainly; but in terms of a cycle, my life as I know it is going to come to an unceremonious end one day. And that’s the center of the music on Solstice. Every heartbreak, every loss, every moment of self-doubt is like a micro-death, and each song on the artist’s third album encapsulates all of those painful moments.
But the brilliance of Williams’s art is wrapped up in restraint. The songs are deceptively simple, moving at a patient, at times glacial, pace. Each instrument occupies a prominent place in the compositions – from the morose piano of final song “The Gentle Breath” to the subtle kick drum preceding the majestic outro of “Just A Shadow” and the furtive strings of the plaintive “I’ve Seen Enough” – the power of the band is enveloped in these deliberate creative decisions. It is indeed, echoes of a life well-lived, even if most of that life has been drenched in misery and loss.
During an interview on her Audiotree performance from 2024, Williams mentioned being inspired by the work of Mono and Explosions In The Sky, and saw herself exploring similar soundscapes “with vocals”. On Solstice, she’s carved her own niche deep within the hardwood of the old forest of post-rock, keeping the dramatic crescendos and shimmering guitars of both bands while overlaying dark, supremely spiritual vocals over top. Songs like “Wolves” and “Hold It Together” take their time to build up to explosively cathartic endings, with Williams pouring out her soul.
Solstice is a deceptively big step forward from 2022’s As the Moon Rests. The songs exist in the same liminal space, as if contained by the satin walls of a coffin. But where her previous album saw an artist content to be buried six feet under, Solstice is the sound of Williams kicking and pounding on the sides of that coffin, buried alive. Songs like “Poison” and “Little by Little” almost flirt with a structure that’s not so distant from the more darkened worlds of Lana Del Rey or Ethel Cain. Both highlights of the album, it’s A.A. Williams at her most self-assured, tight five-minute songs of doom and despair that linger on the ragged edges of a Billboard chart dragged through a morass of self-loathing.
Through the music of Solstice, A.A. Williams has given me the opportunity to look back at the life I’ve lived and the choices I’ve made. And while the songs, quite literally, deal with love both lost and unrequited, the album as a whole digs much deeper than that. In some ways, it is love in its greater milieu that makes her work so powerful. It’s a love that describes how we move through this mortal coil, a deliberate, refined execution of actions and reactions. Like the music on Solstice, life sometimes demands restraint, and within this restraint lies forgiveness. And if we can’t forgive ourselves, is there anything really worth looking back on?
