Recording her debut full-length albumThe Knife, The Needlewas a healing process forElanor Moss, who found herself adrift after touring on two EPs,Citrus(2022) andCosmic(2023). That period saw Moss shifting her sound, experimenting with newgenres and pitching her lyrics toward bombast. “Nothing felt right,” she recalls, “so Itook the pressure off myself and tried to calibrate my relationship with songwritingand music.” The three years she spent writingThe Knife, The Needleultimately foundher returning to her roots in and love for, as she puts it, “the music that made mereally feel something; the music I wanted to be writing.”“These were folk and contemporary folk songwriters,” she continues. “I spent a lotof time playing the guitar. I borrowed a four-track tape machine and demoed songson it. I also started therapy again, where I was beginning to unpack my understandingof where I come from, how my family history plays out in the things I do and howI love and receive love. Out of the slowness and quiet of those rhythms came thesesongs.”“Sarah Waiting in the Car” sets the tone, with Moss’ delicate, contemplative guitarplaying and the brushstrokes of Matthew Herd’s ensemble — Marcus Hamblett(horn), Jool Owen (horn), Andrew Stuart-Buttle (Violin), Reid Jenkins (Violin),Linus Fenton (double bass), and Herd (saxophone) — embellishing her lyrics withheart-rending gravitas as the narrative spilling out of Moss turns from a meeting atthe bar to the aftermath of an abusive relationship, gentleness turning into violence.The Knife, The Needleconcerns itself with the way relationships are transformed,complicated, and troubled by love. In “Fixer” Moss grapples with the fact that loveis as capable of harming someone as it is healing them. Its chorus, “I’m afraid that ifyou show me the knife / I might use it on you babe” shifts to something else entirely:“Maybe what we thought of as a knife / Is just a needle we could use / To stitch thewound?”It’s devastating work, at once patient and vulnerable, opulently rendered and keenlyfelt.The Knife, The Needleemerged from a place of restraint, with Moss — staying ata cabin near her parent’s house in the Scottish highlands after initially recording adifferent version of the album in New York City — feeling the pangs of the albumshe hadn’t recorded — “quieter, weirder, more English.” Rerecording with a newensemble and producer/engineer Pete Miles was a risk — not only was she puttingaside a completed project, but the quieter, weirder, more English sound manifestedby her second attempt atThe Knife, The Needleis utterly revelatory, both of Moss’talent and the wounds she and her subjects carry. It was worth it: both objects namedin the album’s title are capable of drawing blood, but illuminated by her voice andguitar, what bleeds out from the wounds she shares here is nothing short of poetry.

1. Fixer
2. Again, My Love
3. Sarah Waiting in the Car
4. Improvisation
5. You Are Coming Home Tonight
6. Secrets of the Universe
7. Clothes in a Hotel Sink
8. Louise
9. The Way That It Feels