Review by Rick Eaglestone for MPM
A. A. Williams – classically trained, London-based, a guitarist, pianist, and cellist who arrived at heavy music by the most circuitous and sincere of routes has been operating in that mode since her self-titled EP in 2019 introduced a sound that defied easy categorisation and demanded full attention.
Two acclaimed studio albums followed: Forever Blue in 2020, recorded largely in a two-bedroom flat, and As the Moon Rests in 2022, where a ten-piece string ensemble and a proper studio gave the architecture of her songs a scale that matched their emotional ambition.
Both were met with the kind of critical response that does not produce commercial ubiquity but does produce a devoted audience willing to follow wherever the music leads. Solstice, her third studio album and first for Reigning Phoenix Music, is where that audience gets confirmation of something most of them already suspected: that Williams is building something larger than any single record, and that the building has never been more purposeful than it is here.
Williams has spoken of the record as occupying the difficult space between darkness and emergence, and that framing is precise rather than promotional: the eleven tracks on Solstice are not studies in darkness for its own sake, nor are they the uncomplicated arrival at light that the solstice metaphor might suggest. They are something harder to achieve, the honest documentation of what the passage from one state to another actually feels like, which is to say uncertain, non-linear, and at moments overwhelming. The album draws on the accumulated experience of years of global touring alongside Cult of Luna, Explosions in the Sky, Russian Circles, Sleep Token and The Sisters of Mercy, and that hard-won knowledge of playing in rooms where music is treated as something genuinely consequential is audible in every compositional choice.
As the Moon Rests was Williams finding the full scale of what her songs could hold, Solstice is her deciding exactly how much of that scale each track requires. The result is an album with greater dynamic range and greater restraint operating simultaneously, moments of stark, near-solo intimacy that open without warning into surging post-rock crescendos, the guitars arriving not as a sonic event but as an emotional inevitability. String arrangements that appeared across earlier work return here with a surer touch, present where the emotional register demands them and absent where it does not. As a production statement, Solstice represents the fullest realisation of the A. A. Williams sound to date.
The album opens with its lead single, and the choice is an act of confidence rather than calculation. At four minutes and fifty-nine seconds, Poison does not rush its introduction: the guitar arrives first, an arpeggiated figure that establishes the harmonic language before Williams’s voice enters to map the emotional terrain. The track is about learning not to fear freedom, about the particular vertigo of a self-expanding past the limits it had accepted as permanent. The crescendo, when it arrives, earns its force, not through volume alone but through the accumulated tension of everything that preceded it. As an opening statement, Poison is as clear-eyed and fully realised as anything in her catalogue.
Where Poison moves toward release, Wolves turns inward. The single that preceded the album announcement, it explores the liminal territory where consciousness and subconsciousness interpenetrate the blurred boundary between dreaming and waking, between what is felt and what is said. The dynamic construction is classic Williams: quiet verses of almost confessional stillness that give way to a chorus carrying the full weight of the emotional content. At four minutes and thirty-six seconds it is lean for the album’s standards, and the economy suits it; nothing is withheld, but nothing is overstated either.
Little By Little is the album’s most rhythmically distinctive piece. Electronic elements sit alongside the core arrangement here, synth chords providing a textural foundation beneath Williams’s voice that shifts the sonic register without departing from the album’s emotional logic. The result sits somewhere between the post-rock architecture of the surrounding tracks and something approaching a cinematic score: a five-minute-twenty-two-second study in incremental revelation, in the slow accumulation of clarity that the title names precisely. The staccato phrasing of the vocal delivery in the second half of the track is one of the album’s most arresting moments.
Hold It Together is built on the tension between its title and its sonic reality: the instruction is an act of will, the music the evidence of how much that will cost. The piano, deployed here with the care that Williams — classically trained, a pianist long before she was a post-rock guitarist — has always brought to the instrument, opens the track before the guitars arrive to reframe everything that came before. Williams has described the track as exploring the fragile tension between resilience and internal collapse, the experience of carrying deep feeling while presenting calm on the surface. The six and a half minutes are among the most affecting she has committed to record.
Outlines earns its runtime by treating the space between notes with as much care as the notes themselves — a compositional philosophy that Williams has always applied but that reaches its clearest expression here. The dynamic construction is patient: the opening minutes establish a harmonic world that feels complete before the guitars enter to expand it, the addition not replacing what was there but placing it in a larger context. The production, especially the clarity with which Adrian Hall places each element in the arrangement is at its most transparent here, the recording serving the composition with no mediation.
The album’s mid-sequence pivot. Where the preceding tracks have moved through emotional states of varying intensity, I’ve Seen Enough carries a particular weight: this is the voice of someone at the end of a specific patience, the language direct in a way that the more atmospheric tracks rarely are. The violin, deployed with purpose rather than decoration, raises the emotional stakes of the arrangement at exactly the right moment. At five minutes and eleven seconds it is the track that sits most clearly at the intersection of Williams’s classical training and her metal instincts, and the intersection holds.
The Veil is not a lesser track by any means as the songwriting is as careful as anywhere on the record, but it operates differently, its comparative brevity and contained dynamic serving a structural purpose in the sequence. It is the breath before the second half of the album, the moment of stillness that makes what follows possible. The restraint required to write a track like this to resist the temptation to expand it, to trust that the album needs this particular weight in this particular place is a different kind of compositional intelligence than the one that builds crescendos, and no less demanding.
Just A Shadow inaugurated the Reigning Phoenix Music era the single released in December 2025 that announced the label partnership and gave the first indication of where Solstice was headed. Heard now in the context of the full album, it earns its place in the sequence rather than simply occupying it: the stark intimacy of the arrangement, the animated video by Costin Chioreanu that accompanied its release deploying visual language that matched the sonic one, the emotional register of a voice addressing its own residue. The track embodies what RPM co-founder Gerardo Martinez captured when he welcomed Williams to the label, calling her “unafraid to explore vulnerability with a rare poetic depth.” The depth is here in abundance.
It Won’t Rain Forever carries a lyrical directness that sits in productive tension with the sonic world Williams constructs around it, the guitars at their most atmospheric, the arrangement doing what post-rock arrangements do at their best, which is to demonstrate emotionally what the words can only state.
Breathefunctions as a near-complete distillation of the A. A. Williams aesthetic: the guitar voice that has become as recognisable in the post-rock landscape as any instrument played by a single individual; the piano that underpins the harmony with a classical intelligence that the rock context never diminishes; the voice that carries emotional content of a weight that requires this specific combination of instruments to hold it without becoming sentimental. Breathe is the track that most clearly demonstrates what has developed across three albums and six years: an artist whose control of her chosen form is now absolute.
The album closes on its longest and most fully realised piece: six minutes and three seconds of music that earns every second. The Gentle Harm does not resolve the emotional journey of Solstice so much as it holds it, names it, and acknowledges that the holding and the naming are themselves forms of progress. The string writing across the second half of the track, the guitars at their most open and unhurried, Williams’s vocal at its most unguarded , the combination produces something that the best closing tracks always produce: the feeling that what has preceded it was building toward exactly this, and that this could not have been reached any other way. It is among the finest things she has written.
What Solstice ultimately makes the case for is that A. A. Williams is not a genre artist whose achievement is measured against the conventions of a scene, but a composer and songwriter whose work happens to use the vocabulary of post-rock and heavy music because those vocabularies are capable of carrying the emotional weight she needs them to carry. Three studio albums in, the artistic project is clearer than it has ever been: the honest documentation of interior states – transformation, grief, resilience, love, the slow accumulation of self-knowledge through the specific combination of instruments and dynamic construction that Williams has developed and that now sounds like nobody else working in this space.
Four years on from As the Moon Rests, the longest gap of her studio career to date, the wait has been warranted. Solstice is a record that earns its title: the still point between states, the moment when what has been and what will be held in equal and unresolved proximity, and the holding itself is the work.
Solstice Track listing:
01. Poison
02. Wolves
03. Little By Little
04. Hold It Together
05. Outlines
06. I’ve Seen Enough
07. The Veil
08. Just A Shadow
09. It Won’t Rain Forever
10. Breathe
11. The Gentle Harm
Line-up:
A. A. Williams – Vocals, Guitar, Piano, Cello, Keyboards
Thomas Williams – Bass, Co-Production
Geoff Holroyde – Drums
Website: www.aawilliams.co.uk
Spotify: open.spotify.com/artist/aawilliams
Instagram: www.instagram.com/aawilliamsmusic
Facebook: www.facebook.com/aawilliamsmusic
9/10
The fullest realisation of a singular artistic vision.
