Angel Olsen's 2016 album My Woman found the versatile singer broadening her stylistic reach, lending brashness and force to a sound that was hardly lacking in intensity to begin with. For her first album since — not counting the surprisingly cohesive 2017 odds-and-ends collection Phases — she's set to mine even more new terrain.
Olsen's fourth studio album, All Mirrors, comes out Oct. 4. And if its title track and first single is any indication, it promises to be her farthest-reaching work yet: Recording with producer John Congleton with arrangements by Jherek Bischoff and Ben Babbitt, Olsen enlisted a 14-piece orchestra to turn her intimate compositions into something sweeping and massive, yet still unmistakably warm-blooded. (Olsen first recorded a stripped-down version of the album with producer Michael Harris; those recordings are likely to see release at a later date.)
"In every way — from the making of it to the words to how I feel moving forward, [All Mirrors] is about owning up to your darkest side, finding the capacity for new love and trusting change even when you feel like a stranger," Olsen writes in a press statement. The album's fantastic title song expands on those ideas while enshrouding them in a booming, '80s-adjacent synth swell that grows more orchestral as the song unfurls.
In an email to NPR, Olsen describes "All Mirrors" and its accompanying, Ashley Connor-directed video as follows: "A woman lost in a labyrinthine dream reflection climbs upward and traverses in and out of passages, afraid of the many selves that she carries, clouded and unable at first to face who she is meant to be: uninhibited and aware, unashamed and at peace, in control of her own universe, yet calmly leaving space for the inevitable possibility of change and inward shifting."
All Mirrors comes out Oct. 4 via Jagjaguwar. Album artwork and full track list below:
1. Lark
2. All Mirrors
3. Too Easy
4. New Love Cassette
5. Spring
6. What It Is
7. Impasse
8. Tonight
9. Summer
10. Endgame
11. Chance
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
