Daughter
If You Leave

I consider the choice of the tracklist in an album to be crucial: a good or bad tracklist can mean either entertaining the listener until the end or boring them to death after just a few pieces, even with the same exact songs available. With "If You Leave," the first LP by Daughter, a London-based indie/folk trio founded in 2010 by singer Elena Tonra, the risk of delivering a soporific work was very high: the mood indeed remains more or less constant throughout the duration of the album, with ten tracks aligned with the voice, always set on melancholic atmospheres, a sense of solitude and abandonment (and the title of the work already tells us this). Fortunately, we also find some songs that deviate from the central theme of the album, thus making If You Leave a work that, though not easy to listen to (it can really slice your soul emotionally), is quite smooth from beginning to end.

It starts with a piece whose title already says a lot, Winter is indeed a minimalist ballad featuring the main ingredients on which the entire album is built: abandonment, melancholy, and regret for better times, metaphorically represented by summer, now distant; now it’s winter, and all that remains is to say "we were in flames [...] now we are strangers." Smother, enriched by choral and cathedral-like reverbs that make the piece very "spacious," continues along this line, then gives way to the two most interesting tracks of If You Leave: Youth and Still, chosen as singles, having very well-characterized choruses that immediately stick in your head, unlike the other tracks, which are freer and "circular," if you'll allow me the term. Youth picks up typically folk sounds, and together with Elena's thin voice, results in a very intimate and personal track about the hopes and illusions peculiar to youth ("'cause most of our feelings, they are dead and they are gone"), while Still has an almost martial rhythm, embellished by delay guitars that nod to post-rock tradition. As we move forward, the atmosphere becomes more serene and light-hearted, but only once, in Human, where we finally find acoustic guitars that break the hypnotic and evanescent atmospheres that had crystallized earlier (Lifeforms and Tomorrow stand out): in my opinion, it deserves the award for the best track of the album, also because If You Leave continues and concludes without further surprises, with tracks that seem to mix and resemble each other. Negative note? Certainly not, the atmospheres and sounds used (circular chord progressions à la XX, minimalist beats, and a lot of reverb) are deliberately very similar to each other, to accentuate the feeling of abandonment and desolation in the listener, who is literally overwhelmed by the environment created by the album.

Emotionally, it is challenging to listen to, but as reiterated at the beginning, the tracks, though set on a single mood, ingeniously alternate in an LP that, all things considered, proves honest and sincere, unlike many other bands where melancholy and similar moods seem a bit too forced and not genuine. In a genre where new bands emerge daily, therefore, Elena Tonra's Daughter come up with an original debut, which, in my opinion, shines in a sea of mediocrity.