*Get Set* opens with ‘Bubble’, and the title feels instructive. Lyn exists, musically, inside her own sealed world \u2014 one where jazz harmony is considered perfectly normal pop currency, where a ukulele and a saxophone can share a chorus without apology, and where emotional honesty isn’t performed for an audience but simply expressed, the way you might jot something in a diary you’d forgotten wasn’t private. The production is clean without being clinical, intimate without being bedroom-demo rough. For someone barely old enough to vote, the technical command here is quietly staggering.<\/p>
Lead single ‘Cookie’ is the album’s most immediate statement of intent. Built on jazzy chords and stacked vocal harmonies \u2014 all Lyn, all live \u2014 it tackles the quietly suffocating pressure of conforming to someone else’s idea of acceptable taste. The subject might sound slight written down, but Lyn locates something genuinely felt in it; the saxophone line cuts through like a deliberate provocation, a musical gesture that essentially dares you to judge it. You won’t.<\/p>
‘Ceilings’, the title track and the album’s most recent composition, is where *Get Set* briefly holds its breath. Lyn has described writing it as an attempt to anticipate how her gap year would feel, marvelling in retrospect at how accurately she’d predicted her own emotional weather. It is a quietly remarkable thing \u2014 a song that manages to be both introspective and oddly spacious, proof that self-examination need not mean claustrophobia.<\/p>
The album’s tracklist reads like a collection designed for sustained listening rather than playlist fragmentation. ‘Rosemary Rows’, at just over two minutes, flickers past like a memory you can’t quite place. ‘Promises’ is the album’s most expansive moment, its three-plus minutes feeling genuinely earned. ‘Pretty Boy’ is the closer that lingers longest \u2014 three minutes forty of something more complicated than its title implies.<\/span><\/p> Lyn’s declared touchstones \u2014 Sabrina Carpenter’s pop sharpness, the neo-soul warmth of Corinne Bailey Rae, the genre-curious instincts of Liang Lawrence \u2014 are audible but never imitative. She has absorbed influences the way good writers absorb their reading: thoroughly enough that the sources become invisible. The result is a sound that belongs to her rather than to its references.<\/span><\/p> What keeps *Get Set* from being merely impressive rather than genuinely affecting is the emotional span of its material. These songs were written across different chapters of a life that has, objectively speaking, only just begun \u2014 childhood through to the anxious optimism of eighteen. That breadth gives the album a texture most debuts lack. The earlier songs carry the directness of someone who hadn’t yet learned self-censorship. The more recent ones show someone learning to trust complexity. Together they form a portrait, uneven in the way all honest self-portraits are.<\/span><\/p> Growing up in a household shaped by a choir-leading, trumpet-playing mother and a guitarist-double bassist father, Lyn has clearly internalised music as a form of thought rather than performance. It shows. *Get Set* does not sound like someone trying to break through. It sounds like someone who has simply always been making music, and has finally decided to let others hear it.<\/span><\/p> Oxford has handed the world a great deal over the centuries. Here is one more thing worth paying attention to.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\nhttps:\/\/bethany-lyn.com\/<\/a>\n\n\n\n\n
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