CD of The Week

Harriette Pilbeam’s (aka Hatchie) third album, Liquorice, is a reset for the artist, as she redefines what she wants out of music, and ultimately, life. After a polished second album, 2022’s Giving the World Away that featured slick production from Jorge Elbrecht (Caroline Polachek, Japanese Breakfast) and Dan Nigro (Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan), Pilbeam found herself living in L.A. only because that felt right for her career. She found herself isolated from her friends, but held true to the belief that she was on the best path for success. Even after the critically positive praise of Away, she told The Sydney Morning Herald, “I was like, ‘Okay, cool, onto the next thing … we can do better’. I just always thought I could do better.”

But a series of events in one week in June of 2022 made her reevaluate everything. Both she and her husband Joe Agius contracted COVID, they experienced a shooting close to their home, and they felt disenfranchised when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. It had only been two months since Giving the World Away had come out, and while she was already crafting the bones of what would become Liquorice, the couple chose to move back home to Australia…literally…moving in with Pilbeam’s parents. There, they began to take inventory of what they wanted out of a simpler, quieter life.

The change also led her to reevaluate how she wrote songs. Rather than make sure every endeavor had a calculable purpose, she allowed herself to compose “bad songs and bad music,” eschewing her self-imposed boundaries of what music had to be and just wrote freely for herself. After about two years of the new process, she had enough material for Liquorice. They made a return trip to L.A. and hired Melina Duterte (aka Jay Som) to produce the album at her home studio with Agius’s help. The result is a batch of flowing, reverb-filled dream pop that explores universal components of love through a nostalgically naive lens.

Both the opening track “Anemoia” and the slow dance title track “Liquorice” are floating, ethereal songs with breathy vocals that look back to youthful romantic situations, narrated with educated eyes. There are also many jangly tracks like “Carousel,” which opens sounding like Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me,” and the first single “Lose It Again,” both of which read like a young girl’s private diary entries; yearning for and trying to trap perfect romantic moments. Pilbeam’s vocals sway back and forth between the likes of Belly and Charly Bliss on the catchy “Only One Laughing” and the cutesy, bass-focused “Someone Else’s News.” But there is a bit of a harder, shoegaze-y edge to the Garbage-lite single “Sage” and the buzzing fuzzy vocals on “Wonder.”

The two shining moments are stylistic opposites and come late on the album as it nears completion. The fully immersive concept “Anchor” not only sings of drowning depression accelerated by a malicious partner but also creates a watery soundscape, musically mimicking the slow, agonizing sensation of drowning via waves of wobbly, reverberating guitar and washing percussive fuzz that ultimately overtake the vocals. And the most fun song, the album closer "Stuck," comes at the expense of the singer being trapped in a forbidden love of sorts, repeating the same mistakes and possibly heading toward disaster. Counter to the vocal imagery, the song is bubbly, shiny power pop, bopping carefree along the tail of a driving comet as layers of ringing guitar fill in to create a wall of sound.

One of the toughest things to do as an adult is find the delicate work/life balance, and it seems like Pilbeam is doing just fine, taking one day at a time to see where life takes her. Easing back into promoting Liquorice, she only has two U.S. tour dates currently planned for February 2026 in L.A. and NYC.