Album Review: Daughter - If You Leave

Vocalist Elenor Tonra's trio Daughter certainly built their hype before dropping their debut album. With sold-out English tours and musical appearances on TV series Skins under their belts before a full-length, expectations were bound to play with results. Nonetheless, If You Leave is a stellar debut.

Dream poppy, haunting and beautifully distant from the trappings of being a smaller group, Daughter have crafted something very special on this album. The songs move between minimal Leonard Cohen-style guitar ballads, only with deeper and more thoughtful production, and haunting, This Mortal Coil-vintage 4AD-reminiscent gothic romanticism. No comparisons do the record full justice, however, as Daughter's sound is truly their own, carried by gorgeous ethereal vocals.

Youth is the album highlight and immediate attention grabber. With a rockier chorus than most of the record, it leaps out, beguiling the nature of the lyrics, which are typical of the album's honest and genuine tone; “If you're still bleeding, you're the lucky ones/'cos most of our feelings, they are dead and they are gone”.

If You Leave is, at its core, a tender piece of work. Even when production becomes booming and sounds tower atop of one another, as on standouts Smother and Youth, you know it's all but a small push from being revealed as the sparse and lonely record it is. At times, the sounds are so delicate you feel like you can almost hear Tonra's heart beating behind the acoustic plucking. If You Leave isn't a perfect record, but it's a bold debut album from a haunting and powerful trio who have a very bright, and paradoxically dark, future ahead of them.