Into The Music
Angel Olsen has spent over a decade making records that sound like they were created in a different atmosphere from everything around them, and the interesting thing about her career is the way she has changed that atmosphere without losing what made her work distinctive in the first place.
The singer started with bare-bones folk recordings. Half Way Home in 2012 was primarily voice and guitar, and it established her as a writer of unusual emotional precision. What followed was a series of deliberate transformations: Burn Your Fire for No Witness in 2014 brought in a full band, My Woman in 2016 pushed into rock territory, and All Mirrors in 2019 went fully orchestral with string arrangements that sounded like nothing she had done before.
Big Time in 2022 pulled toward country and Americana, and arrived alongside her public disclosure that she is gay and that her parents had recently died. The album processed grief and self-discovery in ways that were unusually direct for an artist who had mostly operated through atmosphere and indirection.
What has stayed constant across all of it is the voice, a rangy and slightly strange instrument she uses with a confidence that makes even her most experimental choices feel grounded. There is nobody who sounds quite like her.