Album Review: Julie Byrne, The Greater Wings

Julie Byrne’s third album is a meditation on grief and a love letter to life, healing and the mornings yet to come. The Buffalo, New York songwriter started working on The Greater Wings with her long-time producer and former boyfriend, Eric Littmann, before the pandemic, but the project was derailed by his death, aged 31 in the summer of 2021.

The songs they’d recorded already had a haunting quality. The details of Littmann’s health have been kept out of the media by request of his family. Still, throughout The Greater Wings, the spectre of mortality is ever present and given a mournful lustre by Byrne’s sad, expressive voice. “One day the skin that holds me will be dust,” she sings on ‘Summer Glass’. “And I’ll be ready to travel again.”

The architecture of the record is both brittle and effervescent. Synths coo, Byrne’s voice, if powerful at moments, sometimes shakes and shudders from the sheer emotion. And that depth of intensity ultimately elevates The Greater Wings, as, on the title track, she declares, “Name my grief to let it sing / To carry you up on the greater wings”.

It’s heartbreaking – but simply by coming through the experience and having the courage and honesty to sing about it, Byrne tells us that the end never truly is the end, and there will always be reasons to go on living and fighting.

8/10