Forget What Makes It Glow (2023 Isadora Eden album)

Isadora Eden started as a solo project in a more indie singer-songwriter vein but even the early releases were imbued with an imaginative flair and an ear for deeper emotional coloring. As Eden brought on board collaborators to help flesh out the sound in the newer songs she was writing the music evolved into a darker, more sonically rich sound that was a bit more like something one might expect to hear from a songwriter like PJ Harvey or Mary Timony but more darkwave, more flourishes of atmospheric sounds both guitar-rooted and electronic akin to the stranger end of shoegaze. This creative period has resulted in one of the more fascinating records of 2023 in forget what makes it glow, the debut full-length for the project. Eden’s deeply evocative voice guides you through an introspective set of songs that are melancholic, reflective and in the end cathartic. Like the kind of dream pop record with some grit and edge, willing to wax noisy in moments as if to embody the way life and our subsconscious experiences are analog and meaningful, intimate, in a way pristine digital and curated experiences rarely are. The album will be available on vinyl and digital and for more information on finding group’s releases, social media and upcoming shows please visit the band’s website.

Listen to our interview with Isadora Eden and main songwriting partner and drummer Sumner Erhard on Bandcamp and catch one of the album release live shows listed below.

Thursday 7.13 w/Mystee and SGRNY at The Lair (207 ½ S. 3rd) 7 p.m. Laramie, WY

Friday 7.14 at The Lyric Cinema 7:30 p.m. w/Safekeeper, Elke and Mystee

Saturday 7.15 w/Pink Lady Monster and Deth Rali at The Marquis 7 p.m.

If the lyrics to “Haunted” can be taken even remotely at face value, Isadora Eden has transmuted a great deal of pain and anguish into a beautifully resigned melancholy. The nuance and detail in the guitar work and the impressionistic bass lines elevate the dark mood of the song in which Eden sings about a lingering emotional pain at the hands of another person. The kind of hurt that might come from the kind of emotional abuse you can bury to make it through your days but which spring up unbidden at times with an intensity that can be challenging to set aside when it happens at odd and inconvenient times. Eden speaks to that resurgent rawness of feeling and how it can leave you feeling disoriented when you haven’t had a chance to properly process the trauma of it all. And of the frustration of not being past it and blaming oneself for not having worked your way through the experiences that haunt your emotional state already. Yet in writing these lyrics in this way Eden makes it okay to not be okay and to be willing to be patient with something like the human mind and how it’s not just some technological process that has a set time or parameters or easy fixes. Is the song dream pop? Sure if Chelsea Wolfe wrote dream pop. It Has that richness of mood and attention to detail in songcraft and production that sets it apart from any easy genre categorization which is a sign of the strength of the songwriting to be found elsewhere on Eden’s forthcoming full length Forget What Makes It Glow which drops in July with a release show on July 15, 2023 at The Marquis Theater with Pink Lady Monster and Rose Variety. Listen to “Haunted” on Spotify and follow Isadora Eden at the links below.