Album Review: The Darkening Green by ELIZA
On her best record yet, ELIZA strips her songwriting to its bones and delivers a record about greed, devotion, and the slow violence of forgetting you’re alive. Her third LP earns its anger and joy.
Two years ago, a woman stood onstage at Kentish Town Forum and turned around mid-song to show a six-month baby bump. She’d been singing about light pollution and institutional abandonment. Now she had a son named Rex and a body that had split open to make room for someone else. ELIZA’s previous album, A Sky Without Stars, sounded like it was recorded in a bunker, vocals buried under trip-hop sediment, songs aimed at a world too busy staring at its phone to look up. The Darkening Green, her third record since walking away from Parlophone and the Eliza Doolittle name, comes from a different position. She has described its subject as “the city wound, the distraction traps, yearning for softness, jolting out of a zombie-like existence into cosmic memory and punk spirit.” That’s a lot of words. The album itself needs fewer.
Everybody on this album is a hypocrite, and the first song cops to it. “For the Hell of It” calls every one of us out for chasing money and death over the beauty already sitting in front of us, then turns around mid-verse and points at wildflowers growing in the cracks, waiting for somebody to notice. That pivot—from accusation to tenderness inside the same song—is what the whole record keeps doing. “Spiral” broadens the lens to planetary stakes, a song about killing ourselves for pocket change while forgetting that being alive is the only thing that actually belongs to us. “Zombie Like” shrinks it back down to the body. Where have you been? The pre-chorus answers for you. You’ve been on your way to the grave. The chorus offers one room where you can check whether your heart still has a pulse. Three songs, three distances from the same realization. “For the Hell of It” watches humanity sleepwalk through it. “Spiral” tallies the bill. “Zombie Like” grabs you by the collar and demands to know if you’ve been conscious for any of it.
On “Anyone Else,” the bridge repeats a single plea four times—I need you to know that it’s true—and the feeling is closer to panic than romance. The verse cops to sabotaging love for the illusion of control, and then the song gives in completely. It’s a person who wrecked things on purpose and now can’t stop rephrasing the same apology in different keys. “Pleasure Boy” runs at the opposite temperature. She wants him, she’s telling him precisely what she wants, and the pre-chorus owns up to being hypnotized. No coyness, no buffer between the wanting and the saying. “Because We Can” starts after fear has already won—freedom won’t come tonight, the innocence is already gone, the world is already beating you down—and then begs for kisses anyway. The spoken outro delivers one flat declarative: there is a peace, and there is a joy, that pain cannot take away. She doesn’t qualify it or circle back to it. She drops it and the record keeps moving.
Someone ELIZA considered a close friend turned out to be using her for years. “Cheddar” opens with the question directly—is that all I am to you?—and the slang bites. The hook recounts what she gave freely: love on the house, no invoice, no conditions. The post-chorus fires off five direct questions, each one daring the other person to admit what they did, and instead of collapsing into resentment the second verse goes somewhere stranger. She refuses bitterness because it isn’t worth her shimmer. Her love stays a river, ever flowing, ever open, but the roses are blooming now with extra thorns. “Major” pulls off a similar feat with a friend stuck in self-destruction, someone whose treatment of the world mirrors exactly how they treat themselves. The chorus insists this person matters, that they don’t need all that noise for the world to hear their voice. And then the third verse draws a hard boundary. I can’t pick up the pieces. That’s on you and only you. Both songs carry love and refusal in the same hand. They tell people they count while declining to rescue them.
Stony shadows, cold concrete, a city that drains love from you. That’s where “Fever Dreams” starts, and it’s the one place on the record where the seams show. The refrain snaps into desire: “Bent down on my knees, baby/Feed my dreams, baby/To a heaven where our bodies touch.” Then the third verse arrives with the album’s most important question—what are you getting for all your sweat, your blood, your heart? Only a broken promise. This can’t be the reason we’re here. This can’t be it. The song tries to hold city bleakness, erotic escape, and existential protest inside a single frame, and the seams between those three moods don’t all hold. That closing question deserves a clearer runway than two tonal swerves can provide. It’s the one spot where ELIZA’s reach stretches past her grip.
The remaining arrangements, produced with Finlay “Phairo” Robson and co-produced on four tracks by Emil Larbi, stay spare enough that the words do the carrying. The bansuri on “Major,” played by Hindustani musician Hasheel, sits inside the record without advertising itself, which suits an album that cares more about what gets said than how the room sounds. ELIZA co-wrote and co-produced every song, and the writing has a consistency of nerve that session-built records seldom maintain. She says what she means, says it once, and doesn’t soften it with a bridge that walks it back.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “For the Hell of It,” “Cheddar,” “Zombie Like”