Eaves Wilder "Little Miss Sunshine"
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The record marks a stellar evolutionary leap for the North London singer-songwriter who first came to attention back in 2020, aged 16, with her self-recorded lockdown release Won’t You Be Happy. Eaves began working on Little Miss Sunshine after a period of reflection which saw her question whether she could ultimately do justice to the music in her head.
Time spent with the record will reveal ten songs that look to the cycles of nature to explain and celebrate the emotional weather that makes us human. “At my lowest,” recalls Eaves, who at one point even laughs as she recalls how she resolved to give up music altogether with a view to entering a convent: “I just wanted to be unhuman, unfeeling and unmoved. Like a mountain or a tree. Or the sky. These are all things that have a purpose but I didn’t know what my purpose was. And so what I had to was figure it out, song by song.”
On Little Miss Sunshine, it’s a story told in thrilling installments, from the opening seconds of the album’s sonic establishing shot and lead single 'Hurricane Girl', a sensational synergy of diaphanous shoegaze harmonies and elemental rock guitars inspired by watching documentaries about storm chasers, using the metaphor to shine a light on friends who have been compelled to seek out tempestuous relationships. “I feel like this is my Pearl Jam song,” she explains, “The first time I ever listened to Pearl Jam. I was up this huge mountain in Wales. In the same week, I also heard Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette for the first time.”
From here, right through to its achingly evocative requiem to childhood 'Summer Rolls', each song on Little Miss Sunshine acts as shining a co-ordinate in an arc of self-discovery. There’s the soaring sonic skyburst of the album’s first release 'Everybody Talks', with its rising crescendo of intrusive voices, which gained widespread radio support on both sides of the Atlantic. For 'Mountain Sized', she referenced Lily Allen’s 2009 single 'The Fear' – “because you’ve got this one woman casually listing all the worst things about herself, the kind of stuff you should be too embarrassed to admit.” However, on Eaves’ song, this fomenting anxiety is obliterated by a panoramic chorus which sees her smash through the membrane of her real-world restrictions in order to declare, “But in my mind/But in my mind/I am taller than the highest mountain sides.”
The achingly mellifluous 'The Great Plains' sees Eaves interrogating her earliest memories spent idolizing her older sister Dora. “She was so demure and mermaid-like,” recalls Eaves, “and I was ruled by my emotions – and the harder I tried not to be, the more I realized I could never be like her.” In the song, self-acceptance of sorts comes as Eaves looks to the natural world to tell her what it’s ok to be: “As I erupt into a blaze /It’s ok the sky will do the same/Let no-one bat an eye when /Every year I’ll hibernate till May/Because no-one blames the clouds for rain/So take me as I am, tears down my face.”
As the sessions gathered momentum, Eaves found drew inspiration from contemporaneous releases. Cases in point included Wolf Alice (“the only band that’s achieved the balance I’m always trying to get – the combination of guitars that go that heavy and vocals that go that high and ethereal”), Mannequin Pussy (“they gave me something of what I missed [in the era of Riot Grrrl] when L7 and Babes In Toyland were touring”); and CMAT’s “straight-up brilliant songwriting”.
Other highlights on an album luminous with them are 'Daisy Chain Reaction', whose glistening power pop sheen conceals a lyric about the culture of competitiveness around eating disorders and the queasy mechanized attack of 'Just Say No', a song built around the brutal truths accrued from Eaves and her friends’ skirmishes with abusive men.
Over the course of two years, Eaves worked tirelessly to finesse every single verse, chorus, pre-chorus and middle eight on Little Miss Sunshine before entering the studio with the album’s co-producer Andy Savours (My Bloody Valentine, The Killers, The Horrors). This is an album on which every single detail has earned its right to be there, bearing testament to the singular musical vision of its creator.
