The fact that the London-based singer-songwriter Alice Costelloe, the great-great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, is, on her debut album Move on With the Year, probing into her unconscious to conjure up memories of her estranged father might seem too on the nose or a send-up. Don’t worry, it isn’t either. Instead, it’s a gallant portrayal of a child of a parent battling substance abuse—in other words, it’s an indie pop record with a subject matter barely acknowledged, let alone expressed with such finesse and stoicism. Yet, despite the heaviness of its themes, you could be floating.
The post-war English poet Philip Larkin wrote, in his customary sardonic tone, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.” In the next stanza of “This Be the Verse”, Larkin opens with a punchline to a joke that never existed: “But they were fucked up in their turn.” The specter of Move on With the Year is, of course, Costelloe’s absent father, who moves through the songs fucking her up, or, in her own words, “a vagabond haunting the night.” Yet, perhaps in realizing that he, in turn, was subjected to the errors of his parents, Costelloe doesn’t appear to be reproachful—if anything, compassionate.
It’s this acute sensitivity to the writing, along with not eschewing hard truths, that makes Move on With the Year a compelling and, more importantly, moving piece of work. Moreover, it never falls into the trappings of mawkishness—even when the content is direct and hits you with the sheer force of involuntary memories, which is what Move on With the Year is: a series of reverie-laden imagery set to supple and graceful indie-pop tunes.
To zero in on the lyrics would be to miss what makes Move on With the Year special: a perfectly executed, sophisticated pop record, complete with warm, analogue production. After disbanding the shoegaze duo Big Deal in 2016, Alice Costelloe released her debut EP in 2023, So Neurotic, and, a year later, followed it up with a second, When It’s the Time, produced by Mike Lindsay (one half of LUMP with Laura Marling), whose brilliant production on Move on With the Year accentuates the acoustic woodwinds, synths, Moog, mellotron, crunchy tambourines, rolling drums, and acoustic guitars.
Costelloe’s blithe vocals make you feel as if she has replayed these memories a thousand times: flipping the scenes as if by hand to find a new image, or a new meaning behind an image, and by doing so, the emotion attached to the image dissolves to leave her singing with aplomb like Cate Le Bon and Lael Neale.
The synth-washed opener, “Anywhere Else”, starts so slow that you can almost hear the thoughts of the singer running backwards to a time when innocence, perhaps, can be regained. By the end, the dream is over, and the singer is left with sadness and pain, indignation and desperation, a feeling that fate has dealt her the wrong cards. When the narrator receives a call from the hospital concerning her father, Alice Costelloe screams “Ahhhhhh”, bringing to mind Munch’s The Scream, an existential scream traveling the distance from adulthood to childhood to somewhere between reliving and living.
“How Can I” picks up where “Anywhere Else” left off: the hospital. However, it is about the narrator’s birth, when her father was absent. Musically, it begins with a punchy motorik snare, followed shortly thereafter by a pulsing synth, a recorder, and a tambourine.
Move on With the Year, written in 2024, is infused with stately pop arrangements that hint at an array of influences: 1990s alternative rock (as seen in the dreamlike, Spiritualized-like “Too Late Now”), 1970s soft rock, 1960s chamber pop, and, lastly, the girl groups of the 1960s. Halfway through Move On With The Year, “Damned If You Do” lifts the listener out of the past and into the present: a narrator witnesses friends’ weddings, all the while believing her father will not walk her down the aisle.
Writing in such a candid and direct manner is, firstly, brave; secondly, it can be difficult to pull off. Trauma isn’t interesting in and of itself, which is why many artists are right bores: they fail to look up from their wounds to see that everyone—including their deceased grandmother (god bless her soul)—is/was fucked, as Larkin jocosely highlights. However, Alice Costelloe is too self-aware to become self-indulgent—perhaps she has read Freud’s 1914 essay, On Narcissism.
“Of Course I Know”, the zenith of Move on With the Year, could be Cate Le Bon singing a ballad on Let It Be, complete with a spectral mellotron and a recorder solo. “If I Could Reach You”, the penultimate track, is by far the catchiest track onthe album, an earworm that will have dancing and crying, neither or both. Lastly, the dark wave “Is There Something (Goodbye)” isn’t a sanguine conclusion but a resolute goodbye, instead.
Move on With the Year is a work of refined, elegant art pop, rendered through stunning production, in which Alice Costelloe’s crystalline voice floats over a rich palette of electronic instrumentation with grace. In many ways, Costelloe has taken an intensely personal subject matter and transcended it, as if the real story—the only story, in fact—of the record is the music, which is to say she is a survivor. Although she cannot entirely lay the ghost of her father, the record isn’t a pyrrhic victory: by confronting the past, the present is lived and, possibly, embraced. If not, this album will make you dance. Sometimes that is enough.