SELECT REVIEWS for ‘A Requiem’ by Penelope Trappes:

“There are passages of profound beauty and clarity amid the maelstrom” – Pitchfork

After the dream pop of her self-titled trilogy, the Australian-born, UK-based musician explores darker ambient textures on an album rooted in ancestry, trauma, and ritual. In the videos released before A Requiem, bodies assume strange poses, moving in slow motion if at all—otherwise hanging, suspended, like a museum piece or an effigy left behind after a ritual. Penelope Trappes’ music has the same energy, tapped from some eternal source—like the Bandorai of the opening track, a ritual invocation of the ancient Celtic priestesses. On “Bandorai,” Trappes mourns the loss of the past while navigating the tumult of her present, an uncomfortable push-and-pull that defines her gothy fifth album, which combines drone, modern classical, and neofolk.

Most of Trappes’ solo music falls under the ambient umbrella. Her trilogy of self-titled records exploded dream pop into something cold and occluded—music that billowed outwards instead of inviting you into its seductive embrace. A Requiem is different, less dissolute. Here, the songs snap back into (soft) focus on an album that interrogates Trappes’ own cross-generational trauma and family strife. It’s a lot for 34 minutes, but she comes out the other side renewed, having passed through a period of intense introspection and psychedelic therapy.

To record A Requiem, the Australian-born, Brighton-based musician traveled to Glasgow, where she connected with her Celtic ancestry in a way she never had before. She has said that the music is rooted in the British Isles, though those links are not always apparent—some tracks are devoid of words, in favor of primordial keens and wails, while others draw out words like “ocean” or “home.” With its deep exhales and arch vocals, A Requiem reminds me most of late period Coil, when the UK group decamped from London to the Somerset countryside and made music to soundtrack nightly walks in the pitch-black forest. Trappes’ compositions are just as environmental, descending like a shroud of mist.

Trappes works out her demons in real time, alternating between brighter passages like “Anchor Us to Second Floor” and heavier centerpieces like “Sleep,” which moves with the halting clank of some eldritch monstrosity. She commands a choir of ghosts with a quiet-loud dynamic worthy of Scott Walker’s 1995 masterpiece Tilt. The other highlight, “Red Dove,” reminds me of James Holden’s The Inheritors, built around an arpeggiated synth that sounds more medieval than modern, underlining the song’s grotesque chorus: “Wash it down/With violent hope.”

The album lurches toward resolution in the stunning “Torc,” where the sound design comes to a head. A crackling noise resembles rain, but as it grows more intense, it could be a funeral pyre, burning what came before and letting loose a cleansing, perfumed smoke. “Torc” turns the album’s leaden drones into a synth-string overture worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster before the album closes on a Sigur Rós-ian note with the gorgeous “Thou Art Mortal,” sung in Gaelic rather than Hopelandic.

The emotional pull of A Requiem is stronger than Trappes’ past material. She draws from sources older than ambient music, opting for a more intuitive style—you can hear it in the simple, moaning melodies, particularly the cello, which Trappes didn’t know how to play when she picked it up for this album. Feeling her way in the dark, she illuminates certain corners before letting the darkness cloak her again. Sometimes it can feel melodramatic and less polished, but that’s part of the approach: There are bound to be uncomfortable moments listening to someone else’s therapy, but there are also passages of profound beauty and clarity amid the maelstrom.

“Trappes has a strong sense of dichotomy, that every aural high has a low, the smooth always has the rough, the light is brought down by the heavy” – The Quietus

“This is a deeply personal record. But the magic of A Requiem is in the way Trappes carries us with her - out of the darkness and into the light” – Bandcamp Daily

“Meditative moments of almost spiritual intensity shifting into caustic tumult” – The Wire

Penelope Trappes's music feels like good architecture - a mysteriously harmonious interplay between space and solidity.

There's the sense of being guided through these songs, but given their unconventional structures, it's not totally obvious how. For the Brighton based Australian composer's fifth album - her first for One Little Independent Records - she turns this rare instinct for sonic space-building to the winding corridors of ancestral relationships and inherited pain.

Written in the wake of the loss of her parents, the songs, she says, "helped me summon up the strength to move through my own awareness of mortality, death, and impending loss". Hesitant fragments of cello and voice shiver with repressed energy on opener "Bandorai", spilling over eventually on the chilling "Sleep" where intermittent slams on left hand depths of the piano intrude shockingly from nowhere, like the hypnagogic jerks that pull us out of sleep. The album seems to advance and retreat between songs.

The burbling synth arpeggios of "Red Dove" offer a rare passage of propulsion, a sudden burst of clarity or energy; this disperses completely in "Caro", a strange interlude of discrete, wordless utterances. Inspired by the Roman goddess Carna, the piece represents a cleansing of body, mind and spirit.

Elegiac closer "Thou Art Mortal" morphs slowly through its bittersweet chords, vocals sung in Gaelic, the texture shot through with Vangelis style percussive bullets like gunfire from a distant galaxy. It has an ethereal, cosmic beauty that in less accomplished hands could be mawkish, but here feels almost miraculous. The whole album feels like an invitation to think alongside it about the end of life - and in these moments typically characterised by fear and isolation, to feel accompanied by anything at all is an unusual and precious thing.

“Beautifully harrowing music with little regard for the rule book” – Prog

“Spellbinding fifth album… a shadow work laced with black-veiled hope” - Line OF Best Fit

“…a deconstructed Björk meets Diamanda Galás on Nico's Desertshore is a glib but effective triangulation” - Uncut

“It’s a deeply personal exploration that somehow also touches a raw nerve of universal emotion, in a way that few artists possess the power to do” – Electronic Sound

Sublime gothic meditations on mortality

In every way, it feels as though Penelope Trappes is on an upwards trajectory. Even as her latest album, 'A Requiem', mines the depths of death, grief and loss, there's a heavenly, ascendant quality here, her striking cello and voice-led pieces lifting us emotionally and spiritually higher than any of her previous work.

Then there's the geographical progression that has informed her life and career. The Brighton-based Australian vocalist and multi-instrumentalist is no stranger to journeying across countries and continents. On the aching, droning title track, she evokes a "living funeral" as she grapples with what it means to belong to a place - "a reclaiming of what home is to me".

'A Requiem' is Trappes' fifth full-length release, following her acclaimed 'Penelope One', 'Two' and 'Three' trilogy, and 2023's tape loop-focused Heavenly Spheres', which was released on her own women-led experimental cassette imprint Nite Hive. To create A Requiem' Trappes travelled north to Scotland, where she embraced the solitude of candlelit recording sessions.

There, she communed with the cello, an instrument that she has no formal training in, but one which almost magically became an extension of her own vocal folds, with the cello's "nerve-like strings" embodying the vulnerability that permeates these 10 breathtaking compositions.

The opener 'Bandorai' references the female druids in Celtic spirituality, a community of poets, seers, astronomers, healers, midwives and mediators. The track is a stark, evocative moment of gothic ambience, marrying the spectral tones of classic 4AD groups like This Mortal Coil and Cocteau Twins with the catharsis of Trappes' haunting, classically trained voice.

She deftly navigates between cavernous, operatic tones on 'Platinum' and the profound wordlessness of pieces like 'Second Spring', where the eerie shriek of feedback stands in for the voice, a poignant metaphor for "how society discards women past a certain age". 'Sleep' marks a standout moment, stuttering into being like a candle flickering in the gloom, before strings crash and scrape against the brimstone of Trappes cataclysmic incantations. 'Red Dove' also deserves singling out for the ecclesiastical ecstasy it conjures via radiant, bubbling electronics. 'A Requiem' is a haunting, transcendental journey, a pinnacle of Trappes' continuing creative evolution. It's a deeply personal exploration that somehow also touches a raw nerve of universal emotion, in a way that few artists possess the power to do.