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  • Genre:

    Rock / Folk/Country

  • Label:

    Grand Jury

  • Reviewed:

    May 25, 2022

Maryland singer-songwriter Jordana Nye’s bright, gauzy indie pop puts a sharp percussive edge on familiar melancholy.

What happens when homespun synth-pop outgrows the bedroom? In Jordana Nye’s case, the cozy, lo-fi harmonies of her early Bandcamp tapes seemed to bloom in a hundred directions at once. Her 2020 breakthrough Something to Say to You played like a sampler, mapping possible futures in stylish electro-pop, earnest piano ballads, or fuzzy experimentation. Just 19 upon the album’s release, the Maryland native flashed unassuming brilliance as a producer and songwriter, mastering a breadth of styles without committing herself to any of them.

One can’t dine out on precociousness forever. On the follow-up, Face the Wall, Jordana and co-producer Cameron Hale collapse the disparate elements of her earlier work into a bolder, brighter soundscape. The instrumentation is still largely synthetic, the vocal effects gauzier than ever. As on Something to Say to You, sharp percussive flourishes contrast the tracks’ hazy layering. On “Pressure Point” and “Get Up,” heavy drum patterns throw the delicate choruses and instrumental breaks into acute relief; the rushing drums and one-note bassline of “Play Fair” animate a series of stop-start transitions.

There’s an evasive quality to Jordana’s performances dating back to her high school-era demos. Often her verses begin in media res, with vocal tracks washing over the instrumentals in soft waves. On Face the Wall, her lyrics maintain a bedroom-tape abstraction: “Catch My Drift” and “Difficult for Now” have sweeping, second-person dedications in place of narratives, weighting down the warm melodies. The record’s most compelling moments are those when Jordana shakes the ambivalence and emerges from the wings. The standout “Go Slow” evokes a familiar melancholy, yet it’s her most forthright affirmation to date: “Focus has never been a friend of mine, half the time I’m not sure if I’m flying/I’ll try, for certainty that I might find/Nothing works unless I take the time.”

If Jordana has a tendency to blend into the wallpaper, it’s largely due to her songs’ structural complexities. The cagey pre-chorus of “Catch My Drift” unleashes a euphoric hook, further refined by a breakdown bridge worthy of an arena-rock finale. On occasion, Face the Wall defaults to sunny ’90s touchstones—the chords of “To the Ground” make it a dead ringer for Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One”—but not enough to distract from the production duo’s vision. With its sparkly guitar, call-and-response chorus, and chunky hip-hop drums, “I Mean That” plays like a Sugar Ray B-side you never thought to seek out.

Face the Wall bolsters Jordana’s resumé with a cohesive full-length, suspending the polymath approach for a more professional-sounding statement. It’s an accomplished record that, given the variety of Jordana’s catalog, feels short on surprises; having mastered the nuances of production and songwriting, she’s still finding ways to make her voice ring clear. Yet her melodies are dynamic, her ballads immune to adolescent melodrama: the toughest hurdles are behind her.

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Jordana: Face the Wall