innerinnerlife - ILYSM (2024)

innerinnerlife’s ‘ILYSM’ is about perfect moments lived and yet to come. Casting back a gaze, indulging the trembling embrace of nostalgia, the border between revisiting the past and remaining there. It’s about teenage epiphanies, the first music-induced skip of a heartbeat; breathing, whispering, feeling. The dazzle of a dream only realised in retrospect.

It’s intimate and glittery. The featherlite driftaways of ‘this reminds me of U’ and ‘if u want’ shimmer like morning light through rain-flecked windows, while Mikey Enwright’s diaristic meditations on ‘airborne’ swirl and sigh over an instrumental that sparkles as it soars. ‘what rhymes with getting by’ and ‘if life was soft’ seem wrapped in soft-spun gauze, delicate like memory. This album grapples with what’s happened and holds its head up high to what’s next. It heals and it pulls apart. It knows life is imperfect but contains perfection.