BILLIE MARTEN: ‘DROP CHERRIES’ ALBUM REVIEW
Billie Marten’s fourth record, Drop Cherries, is a comprehensive love letter that trusts its own instincts.
Photo Credit: Katie Silvester
Plucked from YouTube by Chess Club Records aged sixteen, Yorkshire-born Billie Marten has spent the intervening years evolving her sound. On her latest offering, Drop Cherries, Marten opts largely for acoustic instruments and orchestral strings – a quiet assertion of confidence. It’s easy to visualise the recording of this album live on tape in Somerset and Wales, and, although minimalist, the record thrums with a liveliness befitting its making. Its subject matter – a single relationship held up across the thirteen tracks – is made tangible, as all of the emotions tangled up with that person are laid out and examined.
The opening track, aptly titled ‘New Idea’, forgoes any lyrics for two and a half minutes of ethereal harmonies – enough time to transport you from life’s mundanity to the captivating pages of Marten’s poetry book. Later, ‘Just Us’ does indeed centre on that very mundanity, but possesses an eye for its beauty too: the beauty of two people just laying beside each other and having “something to hold / something to keep”. Further on, piano ballad ‘Tongue’ revisits that imagery: “don’t turn the light off”, Marten pleads, “I want to stare”. Set against a delicate soundscape, these small, infatuated moments manage to become loud and impassioned without Marten ever needing to raise her voice.
Alongside the euphoria of finding comfort, Drop Cherries also ruminates on healing. “I wasn’t well before him”, Marten recalls on ‘This Is How We Move’, “my bones were awful cold”. Navigating a new relationship after – or, indeed, during - mental health struggles brings a unique set of obstacles, including “the anger and the aching” that Marten laments on ‘I Bend To Him’. ‘Nothing But Mine’, another piano-led ballad, offers something of a plea: “dust me off / fix me up”, she insists, “I don’t want / what I was”. Her relationship is not just a comfort, then, but a saving grace – a chance to heal herself. On the titular closing track the metaphor of ‘dropping cherries’, or giving your heart to someone, therefore becomes a fitting denouement: the record concludes with Marten reassuring herself that “now I know what I’m here for”.
Drop Cherries is an album at ease with itself. Musing over her fourth record, Marten concluded that “there was no need to shout this time”; instead, Drop Cherries meets you where you are. Zoomed out, Marten’s airy vocals blend with cinematic string arrangements for a soundtrack that’s at once whimsical and moving. When zoomed in and picked apart, however, the album reveals a treasure trove of sharp observations and heartfelt reflections.
